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BOOKS BY 
REV. WILBUR F. CRAFTS, Ph.D. 

Intoxicating Drinks and Drugs in All Lands and Times. 
Tenth thousand, igo8. Temperance Argument on a Mis- 
sionary Background. Cloth, 75 cents; paper, 35 cents. 

World Book of Temperance. Seventh thousand, igog. 

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Internationalism. Seventh thousand, igog. Cloth, 40 

cents ; paper, 1 5 cents. 

Patriotic Studies. Fifth thousand, igo8. Reform Argu- 
ments in Congress for last 20 years. Cloth, 75 cents (abridged 
edition, 32 pages, 4 cents). 

Practical Christian Sociology. Fourth thousand, igoj. 
Cloth, $1.50. 

The March of Christ Down the Centuries. Eighth thous- 
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The Sabbath for Man. Ninth thousand. Cloth, $1.50 net. 

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Successful Men of Today and What They Say of Suc- 
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THE INTERNATIONAL REFORM BUREAU 

206 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, S. E. WASHINGTON, D. C. 

Send for full Literature List. 



National Perils and Hopes 

A STUDY BASED ON CURRENT STATISTICS 

AND THE OBSERVATIONS OF A 

CHEERFUL REFORMER 



BY 

WILBUR F. CRAFTS, Ph.D. 

Superintendent International Reform Bureau, Author of 

"Praclical Christian Sociology", "The Sabbath 

for Man", "World Book of Temperance " 

" Successful Men of To-day", etc. 



CLEVELAND, OHIO 

F. M. BARTON COMPANY 

i 9 i o 






Copyright 1910 
By Wilbur F. Crafts. 



(g CI. A 2 6 8 1 5 7 



PUBLISHERS' PREFACE. 

The publisher by way of introducing the author 
to any reader who may need such introduction, hav- 
ing in mind that the history of a witness is an 
essential factor in weighing such important testi- 
mony as this book contains, subjoins here the 
biographical sketch of the author which appears in 
the British "Who's Who?" brought down to date. 

Wilbur Fisk Crafts, minister, author, editor, lecturer, 
reformer ; born Fryburg, Maine, January 12, 1850 ; son of 
Rev. Frederick A. Crafts, a Methodist preacher, of Puri- 
tan stock ; married 1874, Sara J. Timanus, Sunday school 
writer and speaker ; graduated at Wesleyan University, 
Middletown, Ct ; 1869, B. A.; 1871, A. M. ; also from 
Boston University School of Theology, 1871, B. D. (Ph. D., 
Marietta College, 1896) ; was pastor of churches in Stone- 
ham, Haverhill, New Bedford, all Massachusetts ; Dover, 
N. H. ; Chicago, Brooklyn and New York, 1867-88. Since 
1871 has been active in Sunday school Work and has par- 
ticipated (usually with his wife) in twenty-nine Sunday 
school assemblies, known as Chautauquas, and in countless 
conventions ; founded the American Sabbath Union, 1889 ; 
lectured in all parts of the United States as its Field Secre- 
tary, 1889-90 ; founded the Reform Bureau, since named 
The International Reform Bureau, 1895 ; chief editor of 
the Christian Statesman, 1901-3; Twentieth Century Quar- 
terly since 1896. Author of 34 books : Through the Eye 
to the Heart, 1873 ; Wagons for Eye Gate, Trophies of 
Song, 1874; Childhood, the Text-Book of the Age, 1875; 
The Ideal Sunday School, 1876 ; Fireside Talks on Genesis, 
Song Victories, 1877 ; The Bible and the Sunday School, 
The Two Chains, 1878; The Coming Man is the Present 
Child, Illustrations of the International Sunday School 
Lessons, Symbols and Svstem in Bible Reading, Normal 
Outlines, 1879; Rescue of Child-Soul, 1880; Normal Half- 
Hours, Plain Uses of the Blackboard, 1881 ; Talks to Boys 
and Girls About Jesus, Teachers' Edition of the Revised 
Testament, Successful Men of To-day, 1883 ; Must the Old 



iv PUBLISHERS' PREFACE 

Testament Go? Talks and Stories of Heroes and Holi- 
days, The Sabbath for Man, Rhetoric Made Racy, 1884; 
The Temperance Century, 1885 ; Reading the Bible with 
Relish, 1887; The Civil Sabbath, 1890; Practical Christian 
Sociology, 1895; Social Progress, 1896; Before the Lost 
Arts, Protection of Native Races Against Intoxicants and 
Opium, 1900. New editions of most of above books 
brought out in the twentieth century. The March of 
Christ Down the Centuries, 1902 ; A Primer of Internation- 
alism (English, Japanese and Arabic editions), 1908; 
World Book of Temperance, 1909 (Mrs. Crafts joint 
author of this and six other books above) ; National Perils 
and Hopes, 1910. Traveled abroad, 1873, 1880, 1906, 1907, 
1909 — in last case Chairman U. S. Government delegates 
to Twelfth International Congress on Alcoholism. 4 d- 
dress 206 Pennsylvania Ave., S. E., Washington, D. C. 



AUTHOR'S FOREWORD. 

At two national conferences of 1909, that of the 
Interchurch Temperance Federation, representing 
the temperance committees of eight denominations, 
and the "Reformers' Conclave," representing by 
delegates and officials, thirty-one national societies 
devoted wholly or partly to moral reform, I was 
invited to open the discussions by a general survey 
of present moral conditions in the nation and the 
world. The reasons that prompted those requests 
justify the publishing of the address, with additions, 
for a larger constituency. The "perils" herein 
described should be made known by all intelligent 
patriots, but especially by the professions, to which 
the people look for leadership. 

Ministers have done more for moral reforms, in 
pulpit and press, than the members of all other pro- 
fessions, but far less than it is their duty and privi- 
lege to do as successors of prophets and apostles 
who fearlessly reasoned, not only with individual 
citizens, but especially with officials and cities and 
nations, of "righteousness, temperance and a judg- 
ment to come." 

As to the doctors, the twentieth century experi- 
ments on alcohol in many lands, showing the harm- 
fulness of the most moderate use of beer and wine, 
which can be made as interesting, and are a thou- 
sandfold more important than explorations of 



vi AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

frozen lands, ought to be made as well known by 
those who are not content to be mere physicians, 
that is, physic dispensers, but are ready to take 
their part in schools and halls as real doctors, that 
is, teachers — a term that puts the emphasis on 
teaching men how to keep well, in which teaching 
they may give to old and young the most persuasive 
arguments for all physical virtues. 

Lawyers, too much accustomed to wait for cli- 
ents to take the initiative, should insist as patriotic 
citizens on having some of the higher privileges of 
the profession in the free and voluntary develop- 
ment and application of laws of the Gladstonian 
grade that make it harder for old and young to do 
wrong, and easier to do right. 

Teachers, next to parents and preachers, have 
the greatest opportunity of all to weed out, at their 
very inception, the vices that sadden the world, 
by teaching the required temperance lessons of pub- 
lic schools and Sunday schools, not as a task but as 
a privilege and power for good. The true teacher 
will not make "the three R's" seem more important 
than the three virtues, abstinence, purity, honesty. 
Sex lessons, as we shall show, are needed no less 
than lessons on alcohol, and lessons on honesty 
should not be forgotten. Teachers should take 
their full share of blame for the robber profits 
charged in the United States for the necessities of 
life, partly due to the failure of the public schools to 
defend the public against extortion by teaching the 
first principles of honesty. The graduates of our 



AUTHOR'S FOREWORD vii 

schools — even the pupils of our Sunday schools — 
enter business in the undisturbed belief that no 
"principles" apply to profits except supply, demand 
and competition, all of which are put out of action, 
not only by the "trust" but also by trade agree- 
ments in every town that has applied the dis- 
covery that "cut throat competition" among mer- 
chants is far less profitable and permanent than a 
quiet union of trades to rob the unorganized public. 

Neither individual conversion alone nor prohibi- 
tion alone will bring the better day. We must get 
men "right with God" personally, but education and 
organization must be added to get men right with 
men socially. In righting men socially, one of the 
most important tasks the world over is that on which 
all veterans in temperance work are united, "Abol- 
ish the bar." But the most serious ethical error of 
the hour is the assumption that this is a panacea 
for all social ills. We need generals who can see 
more than one small fraction of the long battle 
line, of whom it may be said, "He saw life steadily 
and saw it whole." 

In other books I have discussed in chapters what 
in these pages must be presented rough hewn in 
paragraphs, that have a practical purpose as calls 
to battle which would be hindered by greater 
length or elaboration. These paragraphs will bring 
those previous discussions up to date. College 
classes using my "Practical Christian Sociology" 
will find directly supplemental matter in "The 



viii AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

March of Christ Down the Centuries" and in this 
volume on "National Perils and Hopes." 

Much of this book is of the nature of testimony 
by an eye witness before a grand jury. It is essen- 
tial to its purpose, therefore, that the author should 
speak often of his own observations and ex- 
periences. A veteran, on his sixtieth birthday, 
sends this contribution of facts to younger re- 
formers, that being forewarned they may be fore- 
armed. It takes the blackest black to paint faith- 
fully the perils of the hour, and the whitest white 
to paint the hopes. The writer has resisted the 
besetting temptation of reformers to withhold or 
qualify facts that are not encouraging. Where one 
disheartened man needs to be encouraged, a thou- 
sand who are indifferent because ignorant of the 
real situation need to be aroused. One of the 
supreme mistakes of reformers has been to make 
so much of the so-called "reform wave" that idlers 
and cowards in their audiences and among their 
readers have been led to feel that we are going 
to win without their aid. The reformer, like the 
witness, should tell the facts regardless of their 
lights and shadows. There is enough light — 
though it is only morning twilight yet — to cheer the 
most despondent, and there is enough thunder in the 
clouds, if we do not close our windows, to awake 
the dead. 

The reformer, however, must not allow the shad- 
ows in which he walks to get into his own soul. 
Like Lincoln, amid the horrors of a fratricidal war, 



AUTHOR'S FOREWORD ix 

he must cherish "a saving sense of humor," for his 
own sake and the sake of his work, and above all a 
fadeless faith in God. 

Wilbur F. Crafts. 
International Reform Bureau, Washington, D. C. 



"I hold not with the pessimist that 
all things are ill, nor with the optimist 
that all things are well. All things are 
not ill, and all things are not well, but 
all things shall be well because this is 
God's world." — Robert Browning. 



"We need both social reform and 
personal regeneration, a better social 
order and better men, but we shall at- 
tain neither unless we strive for both 
simultaneously. To safeguard and 
develop the individual, found the 
Christian home and build the City of 
God — that is the'work of the Christian 
church." — Rev. David Watson, in 
"Social Problems and the Church's 
Duty." 



National Perils and Hopes 



"Is the world growing better?" Let the orator 
who is bound to prove the affirmative, as if he were 
a debater at school or an attorney for the present, 
compare the opening years of the nineteenth cen- 
tury with the same years in the twentieth, in any 
or every land, and he will seem to prove his case. 

But let the fearless searcher for truth compare 
the beginning and end of this generation in this 
country, with living witnesses as well as dead sta- 
tistics close at hand. 

THIRTEEN INCREASING EVILS. 

Since the Civil War, thirteen clouds, some of them 
cyclonic, have increasingly darkened the American 
sky, namely :. the consumption of liquors, murders, 
divorces, lynchings, labor riots, municipal corrup- 
tion, Sabbath desecration, impure shows, yellow 
journalism, brutal sports, judicial maladministra- 
tion, graft and general lawlessness. 

And in nine of these evils we "beat the world." 

The list might be lengthened, but these should 
furnish thunderbolts enough to arouse the most 
indifferent. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 



I. 

THE CONSUMPTION OF LIQUORS, 
MURDERS AND DIVORCES. 

Let us briefly study, in groups of three, these 
evils that have increased out of proportion to the 
population since 1864. The consumption of liquors, 
murders and divorces are properly grouped to- 
gether, for the first is the chief cause of the second, 
and a more frequent cause than published statistics 
show, of the divorces, which are placed last in the 
group because it is really less harmful to society 
to destroy a life than to dissolve a family. If peo- 
ple were not so excessively individualistic, and so 
unduly considerate of the body even in estimating 
individual welfare; if "the general good" were in- 
deed "the supreme law," the man or woman re- 
sponsible for a divorce, whether wife or husband 
or paramour, would be regarded as a social leper 
quite as much as if he had destroyed a life instead 
of that which makes life worth living, both indi- 
vidually and socially. 

THE CONSUMPTION OF LIQUOR. 

This is a subject which requires a frank and 
fearless discussion. With three or four notable 
exceptions, temperance advocates have most un- 
wisely ignored the fact, which might have served 
as the biggest of our fire bells to awake those that 
"are at ease in Zion," that the per capita con- 
sumption of liquors has increased steadily 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 3 

SIXCE 1844, LIKE A RISING TIDE, EXCEPT IN YEARS 

of financial depression. Again and again, and 
again, editors and orators have proclaimed, as if 
it were all over in the anti-alcohol war but the 
shouting, that there was a relative decrease in beer 
consumption, and an actual decrease in whiskey, 
in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1909, without 
an intimation that liquor consumption usually falls 
off in "panic" years about two gallons per capita, * 



* 



*Per capita consumption of all kinds of intoxicating 
liquors, by Statistical Abstract: 

GALLONS 

1850 4.08 

1860 6.43 

1870 7.70 

1880 10.08 

1890 15.53 

1893 18.20 

1894 16.97 

1895 16.57 

1896 16.66 

1897 16.50 

1898 17.36 

1900 17.68 

1907 23.54 

1908 23.01 

1909 21.86 

The decrease from 1907 to 1909 was only five- 

hundredths of a gallon more than from 1893 to 1895, 
when the "hard times" were not accompanied by any 
"reform wave." The National Prohibitionist notes that 
in August, 1909, beer consumption increased 200,000 bar- 
(2,244,185). In October of that year beer fell off 200,000 
barrels, but whiskey increased 1,500,000 gallons. The 
figures are encouraging, but they do not seem to the 
writer to indicate any very decisive ebb in the destroy- 
ing tide that has been steadily rising for half a century. 
(2,244,185). In October of that year beer fell off 200,000 
barrels, but whiskey increased 1,500,000 gallons. The fig- 
ures are encouraging, but they do not seem to the writer to 
indicate any very decisive ebb in the destroying tide that 
has been steadily rising for half a century. 



4 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

which would account for one hundred and eighty 
millions of gallons decrease before we can figure 
on the effect of the "reform wave." On November 
I, 1909, there had been a net gain of $3,000,000 
in "infernal revenue" from distilled liquors in the 
four months of the fiscal year, and the beer 
revenue had also increased up to October, dur- 
ing which it had fallen off only $194,000 despite 
the reduction, since July 1, of 12,704 in the number 
of liquor dealers. This fact should be pondered by 
those who think a reduction of the number of liquor 
dealers necessarily means a reduction of liquor con- 
sumption and its consequences. Most decidedly is 
this not the case when in place of three small, ill- 
equipped "dives" there is a consolidation into one 
attractive "silver dollar saloon." 

We cannot be sure there is in progress a reduc- 
tion that looks like the approaching death of the 
liquor traffic until we see whether the statistics of 
the year ending June 30, 1910, show prosperity's 
usual unfeeling disregard for the Henry George 
school of reformers, who hold that poverty is the 
chief cause of intemperance and other sins, and that 
people wouldn't do much of anything wrong if they 
were well paid. Luxury has in all history been the 
prolific mother of vices, but the Henry George the- 
ory that "money answereth all things" morally has 
been "laughed out of court" in this period of the 
"great disclosures" of millionaire robbers, beside 
whose frauds on government and people, Robin 
Hood and Jesse James "look like thirty cents." 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 5 

THE STRONGEST ARGUMENT AGAINST 
PROHIBITION. 

The reiterated statement that prohibition has not 
decreased the per capita consumption of liquors is 
the strongest argument of the aroused liquor deal- 
ers, who have spent more money in defensive liter- 
ature in the last four years than in the previous 
forty. That should be both encouraging and arous- 
ing to our side, which is not making a like advance 
to meet the foe. But temperance editors and ora- 
tors alike mostly ignore this most plausible and 
persuasive of all the arguments of their opponents, 
which really is not difficult to answer, and should 
be captured and used victoriously on our side. 

Grant that from 1844 to 1907 the per capita 
consumption of liquors increased except in "hard 
times," despite the fact that several states and many 
towns outlawed saloons. We will grant more than 
that, namely, that the per capita consumption of 
liquors increased with the same exception, despite 
the organization of numerous temperance societies 
and the introduction of temperance lessons in the 
public schools and Sunday schools of the whole 
country. 

Whatever the per capita increase in the consump- 
tion of liquors proves as to prohibition laws it 
proves equally as to total abstinence societies. 
"Prohibitory laws," exclaims the president of the 
Model License League, "so far from decreasing the 
consumption of liquors have actually increased it." 
By the same major premise he should argue that 



6 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

total abstinence societies have increased the use of 
intoxicants, especially as these are much more wide- 
spread than prohibitory laws. 

As all the thirteen evils enumerated in the begin- 
ning of this chapter have increased faster than the 
population, he should also claim that prohibition of 
murder, adultery, lynchings, riots, bribery, Sunday 
work, foul shows, corrupt literature, prize fights, 
malfeasance, graft, and other wrongs has actually 
produced the increase in these evils. 

Manifestly there is something crooked in the logic 
that produces such absurdities. It is a bad case of 
the fallacy, post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after, there- 
fore because of). The liquor dealers' "strongest 
argument," on close inspection, proves as childish 
as the little boy's supposition that the railway train, 
which started after he tooted, started because of his 
toot. The proof of prohibition's good effects is in 
the reduction of crime in the communities where 
bars are outlawed, in comparing license with "no 
license" years, and in the contrast between towns 
and states under the opposing policies. Of these 
we shall speak later in discussing crime as related 
to the saloon. 

But what is the explanation of this riddle that 
perplexes reformers at home and abroad, that the 
per capita consumption of liquors, down to 1907 at 
any rate, steadily increased even when the saloons 
were being steadily decreased? One explanation 
is that American wages were also increasing, enab- 
ling those who drink to buy more. Another ex- 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 7 

planation is that the hours allowed saloons for mid- 
night robbery of their patrons were also increasing. 
It is one of the most amazing illustrations of being 
penny wise and dollar foolish to see chambers of 
commerce promoting catch-penny street fairs while 
making no protest at the all-night opening of sa- 
loons which is allowed, for example, all over Penn- 
sylvania (save where a license judge interposes) 
under what claims to be "the best license law," but 
has been made by this permission for all-night sa- 
loons one of the very worst. It is not alone waste 
of money in drink that the opening of saloons after 
ten o'clock promotes, but direct robbery and murder. 
I have studied groups in saloons between ten and 
eleven at night in which every man was too drunk 
to know whether he was robbed in change by the 
bartender or in other ways by any sober thief await- 
ing his exit at the door. Where nothing more can 
be accomplished, saloons should be limited to day- 
light, and all gas and electric light fixtures prohib- 
ited. Business men on business grounds, if on no 
other, should at least refuse to allow saloons to re- 
main open after other shops are closed, drawing 
from their customers the money due others for real 
"goods." The church is often reproached for its 
lack of business methods in the words of the 
proverb, "The children of this world are wiser in 
their generation than the children of light," but I 
know of nothing more unbusinesslike in alt the 
world than the way boards of trade allow beer and 
opium sellers to kill the buying power and the 



8 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

buyers themselves in the new markets of the mission 
fields and in the home markets as well. 

THE ENEMY'S FALLACY TURNED INTO 
A BUGLE CALL. 

Good generalship on the temperance side will en- 
able us to impress into our service these saloon 
advocates who proclaim that liquor consumption is 
increasing, as buglers to arouse the Church to move 
forward to the "firing line." 

The steady increase in the consumption of liquor 
does not prove that prohibition is not efficient, but 
it does prove that prohibition is not sufficient. 
Every real general in the temperance army 
should see that it means that our anti-saloon 
campaigns must be supplemented by anti- 
alcohol campaigns, for which science has 
forged us in the twentieth centuy such weap- 
ons as reformers never had before. 

The social verdict, "No license," must be followed 
by the individual verdict, "No liquor," as President 
Eliot showed in 1908 in a most conclusive address, 
adapted to win other scholarly recruits to our 
cause, which would have been re-echoed at once in 
every pulpit in the land if the pastors had really 
appreciated their apostolic succession to the work 
of Him who was "manifested that he might destroy 
the works of the devil" ^John 3:8). After a vig- 
orous campaign against the saloon as a loafing, 
treating, plotting resort of thieves and anarchists 
and grafters, in which the churches often show 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 9 

that they have a real social power, the forces usually 
disband as if the ultimate victory were won, though 
half or more of those who voted against the saloon 
think the harm was in the atmosphere of the place 
and in the adulterations, not in the alcohol, and will 
go right on buying their drinks through express 
offices or drug stores under the delusion that beer 
is a relatively harmless drink and alcohol a useful 
medicine, all unaware of the conclusive verdicts of 
scientists to the contrary, which it is an impeach- 
ment of the fidelity of any preacher to find unknown 
by anybody in his congregation. If he would tell 
them less of current doubts and more of these eth- 
ical facts he would show himself a wiser shepherd. 

TEMPERANCE SOCIETIES CAN NOT WIN 
WITHOUT THE CHURCH. 

That liquor consumption has steadily increased 
while one national society after another has been 
added to our temperance forces — the Sons of Tem- 
perance in 1843, the Good Templars in 1857, the 
National Temperance Society in 1865, the Woman's 
Christian Temperance Union in 1872, the American 
Anti-Saloon League in 1893, the International Re- 
form Bureau in 1896, and many more — does not 
prove that temperance societies have not been effi- 
cient, but it does prove that they are not sufficient. 
These are but a thin line of skirmishers, constituted 
from the one per cent of heroes in many churches, 
who, impatient at the steady retreat of the Church 
before the worst foes of God and man, have organ- 
ized themselves into guerilla bands to fight as a rear 



10 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

guard until the main army can be aroused to turn 
about for the final decisive fight, which no other 
force can win. When the Church really becomes 
"the Church militant," it will speedily become, even 
in this world, "the Church triumphant." 

In voters, in wealth, in social influence, the 
Church has more than "the balance of power." But 
so-called "church leaders" are often leaders of 
nothing but retreats. When gamblers or liquor 
dealers or white slavers come out against the Church 
in battle array, these trembling "leaders" cry : "The 
work of the Church must be inspirational. We must 
not meddle in politics. Let us pray." To which God 
replies, as to Joshua, who was praying when action 
was in order: "Get thee up; wherefore liest thou 
upon thy face ?" 

I do not forget that several denominations have 
temperance committees. Of these I shall speak 
later. They count at this point only for the usual 
exceptions, especially as only one of them is doing 
any considerable work, and only two have any em- 
ployed officers. 

The theological professors, of all the people in the 
United States, should most lay to heart the fact that 
the consumption of liquors has been increasing right 
along with the per capita increase of church mem- 
bership. It is an impeachment of pastors, and espe- 
cially of their trainers, that the great increase of 
church members since 1850 has not meant a great 
decrease in the consumption of intoxicants. It will 
no longer be so when pastors are trained not alone 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 11 

to "save souls in heaven," but also to "save society 
if only to make a safe place for saved souls." "City 
problems" will be solved when preachers are trained 
not alone to make a sermon but to build on earth 
the City of God. No pastor who understands the 
second Psalm, in which God gives to his Son "the 
nations — the governments — for his inheritance" ; 
and the fourth chapter of Luke, where Jesus pro- 
claims the full gospel of social justice; and the 
second great commandment, which means, in mod- 
ern phrase, right relations among men, can fail to 
see that the "conversion" he is "called" to promote 
as a partner of God is twofold, well expressed in 
the Salvation Army's translation of the two great 
commandments : "Change the man, change the 
surroundings." 

The first of these conversions is best accomplished 
by individual effort, but the second requires organ- 
ized co-operation of all uplifting forces, in the city, 
the state, the nation and the world. 

CRIME MOSTLY A SALOON PRODUCT. 

Returning to the main line of our argument we 
face again the increased per capita consumption of 
liquors in close conjunction with the corresponding 
increase of crime. At the Twelfth International 
Congress on Alcoholism, held in London in 1909, 
the Chief Justice of England, Lord Alverstone, pre- 
siding at a union meeting of the many temperance 
societies of the military and civil services of the 
British government — let our judges and other ofii- 



12 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

cials take note — gave 90 per cent as his estimate, 
from fifty years' observation as lawyer and judge, 
of the proportion of crime that is primarily due 
to intoxicants. Independently, Judge Wm. J. 
Pollard, of the police court in St. Louis, had previ- 
ously named 85 per cent as his estimate, from a 
lower range of judicial observation. And in a 
paper sent to the congress by Lieut. Col. McHardy, 
based on study of 153 criminal cases in Edin- 
burgh, 84 per cent was the exact result found. 
These strikingly concur with older statistics gath- 
ered by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor (26th 
Annual Report), from wider and more scientific 
examination of the criminals of a whole state, 
which showed that 94 per cent were "addicted to 
the use of liquor," and 82 per cent were "in liquor" 
at the time of committing the offense. What a 
travesty of justice to require judges to license in 
one term of court the business that shall furnish 
nine-tenths of the crime that shall be brought before 
them in all other terms ! 

"no license" means less crime. 

Here it is appropriate to recall that the closing of 
public bars usually reduces crime about two-thirds, 
even though anyone can import liquors for his own 
use under any form of prohibition, and more or less 
liquor is always sold illegally in such cases, as nearly 
every other law is more or less violated. Pages of 
statistics to show that closing bars reduces crime 
might be quoted from "The World Book of Temper- 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 13 

ance" and other reliable sources, but a few repre- 
sentative examples will be sufficient for this brief 
discussion. The number of criminal drunks in the 
state of New Hampshire during the last year of a 
very inferior form of prohibition, badly enforced, 
was 473. In the four succeeding years, under a new 
license law, the criminal drunks rose in number to 
853, 1,337, 1,657, and 2,181, respectively, a fivefold 
increase in four years of so-called "restrictive" legis- 
lation. The difference in the arrests for drunken- 
ness between license and no license years in the same 
Massachusetts cities (this and above statistics from 
the Anti-Saloon Year Book) were as follows — the 
first figures in each case for "no license" years, the 
second showing the increase when licenses were re- 
stored: Brockton, 455-1,627; Waltham, 179-634; 
Taunton, 482-1,202; Chelsea, 398-1,246; Newbury- 
port, 150-673; Lowell, 2,304-4,077; Salem, 503- 
1,432; Woburn, 204-842; Fitchburg, 359-1,160. The 
number of arrests for drunkenness are from two to 
five times as great under license, and it should be re- 
membered that police officers would naturally be 
more lenient under a license regime, and also that 
"no- license" in such local application often means 
only that a nickel trolley ride of half an hour is 
necessary to get to a saloon in the next town. Even 
in England where they are good walkers, keeping 
Bessbrook free of a bar, though there was one a 
mile away, decreased crime by decreasing the facil- 
ities to drink. 



14 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

Back of the court reform that President Taft 
has made the distinctive "Taft policy," and back of 
the juvenile court, which is the best court reform 
already realized, lies the temperance reform — of 
which bar associations and penologists are usually 
shy — whose full accomplishment would cut off at 
least three-fourths of the sad business of courts and 
prisons. It is playing "Hamlet" with Hamlet and 
three of the four murders left out to discuss either 
court reform or prison reform without a full and 
frank discussion of the saloon as the nest of crime. 

EVILS IN WHICH WE BEAT THE WORLD. 

In enumerating the thirteen evils that have un- 
questionably increased since 1864. I named, instead 
of crime in general, the chief personal crime, mur- 
der, in order to avoid useless controversy with the 
willful, professional optimist, who, when told that 
there are more prisoners per capita in our jails than 
in any former decade, catches like a drowning man 
at a straw and cries, "You have counted some long- 
term prisoners twice." There are really not many 
who are counted twice in any comparison by 
decades, for judges and pardon boards and petition- 
ers for pardons in most cases have far more pity 
for the weeping prisoner and his wife and children 
than for the absent and indefinite public. To avoid 
this controversy, however, I have not even cited the 
number of murderers, but the number of murders, 
which are about nine thousand a year, not counting 
the manslaughter of automobiles and football. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 15 

These Chicago Tribune figures are too small by so 
many murders as do not get into the papers, which 
may be fairly supposed to be a considerable number 
from the hundreds of letters that come to the police 
whenever an unknown corpse is found, from those 
whose friends have long been "missing," some of 
whom have no doubt been killed. Our nine thou- 
sand murders a year mostly occur between the hours \ 
of eight in the evening and five in the morning, at 
the rate of one murder every tzventy minutes. Surely 
if justice were more sure-footed and swift this 
bloody record would no longer continue to grow 
redder year by year. Dr. Andrew D. White, former 
president of Cornell and ex-ambassador to Germany 
and Russia, sees grave danger in the prevalence of 
crime, especially murder. In 1910 he said that homi- 
cide is 43 times greater in the United States than in 
Canada, while it is seven times greater than in Bel- 
gium, which is considered the worst country in 
Europe. The average American criminal, he stated, 
serves but seven years of a life sentence, and only 
one out of 74 murderers is convicted. The number 
of felonious homicides per year per million popula- 
tion for various countries he gave as follows : 

Canada 3, Germany 4 to 5, England and Wales 
10 to 11, France 12 to 15, Belgium 15, United States 
over 129. These figures are based on an average 
taken for eight years. In answer to the argument 
that punishment of crime does not stop the crime, 
he gave instances of so-called epidemics of murder, 
which were stopped at once by the hanging of sev- 



16 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

eral found guilty. Dr. White has little sympathy for 
what he calls the pseudo-scientific theory that crime 
is a disease. "The truth of the matter," he says, "is 
that crime is crime and disease is disease." 

Many evils we seek to lay at the door of our 
immigrants, but in the roll of our murderers Amer- 
icans have their full proportion, and this is also one 
of the nine evils in which we "beat the world." Our 
full "nine" in this "base" contest stands as follows : 
murders, divorces, lynchings, labor riots, municipal 
corruption, yellow literature, brutal sports, judicial 
maladministration, general lawlessness. 

DIVORCES INCREASING THREE TIMES AS FAST 
AS THE POPULATION. 

Marriage being regarded by one church as a sac 
rament and by all as a sacred rite, it might be sup- 
posed that all churches would sedulously guard it 
against both contemporaneous and consecutive po- 
lygamy. Mormonism, a hierarchy as heathen as 
Jezebel's priests of Astarte, dominates so much of 
Rocky Mountain politics that it may decide some 
close national election unless a way is found to dis- 
franchise all men and women who "live their re- 
ligion" in defiance of law and civilization. 

But the consecutive polygamy of unwarranted 
divorce is as much more perilous than Mormonism 
to the body politic as blood poisoning is more dan- 
gerous to the individual than a local ulcer. And 
yet, until well into the twentieth century, only one 
denomination that allows any divorce really con- 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 17 

strained its preachers to refuse re-marriage to 
parties divorced on other than the one ground that 
Christ is generally understood to have approved. 
Through that one denomination a union divorce 
committee of the American churches has been 
organized, with Bishop Doane of Albany as chair- 
man, which has had a most favorable influence both 
in church and state. 

In no white nation of Christendom are so many 
families wrecked by divorce as in the United States. 
Japan alone of civilized powers outruns us in this, 
with one divorce to every three marriages. It 
is almost as bad in Cleveland and vicinity, the 
"Western Reserve," colonized from Connecticut, 
and in Kansas City, with one divorce to every five 
marriages in both, not counting the "grace widows," 
deserted without legal permission, for whom re- 
formers should devise some redress, hunting to the 
ends of the earth all husbands who desert their 
wives and children, and compelling them to work for 
their support under state supervision, if such sup- 
port cannot be collected by some other process of 
law. 

Every preacher should prepare himself to present, 
with the confidence of abundant knowledge, this 
subject of divorce, on which even church members, 
especially women, often hold shallow views that are 
based on the marital infelicities of their own 
friends, with no due regard to the general good, 
which often requires the sacrifice of individual 
pleasure or preference. 



18 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

The United States Government, through its Census 
Bureau, collected and collated the divorce statistics 
of the whole country for forty years from 1867, 
during which period the divorces increased three 
times as fast as the population, the increase 
being nearly uniform from year to year and from 
decade to decade. In 1906, the number of divorces 
was 72,062. At the rate of increase shown, the 
number in 1909 would be fully 75,000, that is, about 
250 a day, not counting Sundays and holidays when 
no court sits. 

PROHIBITION NOT A PANACEA. 

The largest percentage of divorces to population 
is found in the following states : Washington, Mon- 
tana, Colorado, Indiana and Arkansas. "Not a pro- 
hibition state in the black list," exclaims the one-idea 
reformer, who believes that closing liquor bars will 
banish about all our social ills. Nay, for Kansas is 
close to the rear, being one of the worst seven 
states in this divorce vice; and North and South 
Dakota, and even Maine, have all ranked high in 
prohibition and low in divorces. These last three 
named have improved somewhat of late — South 
Dakota in spite of a relapse to license. They are 
still far short of the front rank, where stand two 
license commonwealths, New York and the District 
of Columbia, the only ones that have adopted the 
law of Christ on divorce. 

When the city of Worcester, with 142,000 popu- 
lation, by its own local vote became the largest pro- 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 19 

hibition city in the world, the loafers driven from 
the saloons crowded the peanut galleries of the 
lowest vaudeville shows, which a narrow view of 
reform left unmolested to furnish a worse intoxi- 
cation through the eye than had previously been 
taken through the mouth. 

A PROPER ORGANIZATION FOR SOCIAL BETTERMENT 
WOULD PROVIDE FOR FIGHTING INTEMPERANCE, IM- 
PURITY, GAMBLING AND SUNDAY DISSIPATION AS 
FOUR SIDES OF ONE FROWNING FORTRESS, THAT IS 
FIRING FROM ALL SIDES ON EVERY HOME, EVERY 
CHURCH, EVERY HONEST BUSINESS, AND SHOULD 
THEREFORE BE ATTACKED ON ALL SIDES BY ALL GOOD 
CITIZENS IN THE NAME OF CONSCIENCE AND OF COM- 
MERCE. 

If more reasons are needed for a broadening of 
temperance societies to include kindred evils in 
their attack, or for a broadening of the ideas at 
least of temperance specialists that they may see 
that temperance is but the main division of a great 
army of social reform, I have 559,185,000 addi- 
tional reasons, which I shall now proceed to give, 
for not believing that prohibition, even with total 
abstinence added, will produce a social millennium. 
I refer to the millions of Hindus, Buddhists and 
Mohammedans, who, except as white men have 
corrupted a few of them, have been under the abso- 
lute prohibition of their religions for centuries, 
with none of our exceptions for drug stores or 
"original packages," and yet, right along with 
the most perfect prohibition and the most absolute 



20 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

abstinence the world has known, have flour- 
ished impurity, polygamy, slavery and tyranny. 
Manifestly prohibition is not what a Kansas doc- 
tor, in one of its hotels, claimed in his sign to be, 
"A specialist in all chronic diseases." Abstinence 
has been of vast benefit to these peoples, saving 
them from a deeper poverty and degradation than 
they now suffer, and Britain has been foolish as well 
as wicked to break down this great virtue for paltry 
license fees that hurt politically and commercially 
as well as morally. But no one, in the light of this 
age-long experiment upon millions of people, can 
reasonably hold the view that to "get right" on pro- 
hibition is to get rid of about all our social wrongs. 
As some can lead a division but not an army, so 
there are many who can do their best work for God 
and man by devoting themselves to one reform; 
but the Church of God as a whole, in every city 
and in every nation and in the world at large 
should be organized to attack the whole "far-flung 
battle line" that fights unitedly the world over 
under the mighty triumvirate of appetite, lust and 
greed. 

DESERTION NOT A SCRIPTURAL OR REASONABLE 
GROUND OF DIVORCE. 

It should arouse Presbyterians to find in the gov- 
ernment report on divorce that "desertion," which 
the Confession adds to the one ground of divorce 
that Christ gave, is the most frequent and the most 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 21 

abused excuse for divorce. Apparently, because 
Paul said to Christians newly converted from 
heathenism that if their mates left them on that 
account they should let them go, the "Westminster 
divines" leaped to the conclusion that they were 
free to get married again despite Christ's plain word 
to the contrary ; that is, a permission for voluntary 
separation is treated as a permission for absolute 
divorce. This Presbyterian error hinders the di- 
vorce reform plan of the churches' union divorce 
committee, and keeps in the rear rank on this re- 
form the denomination which, as I shall show, leads 
all in the land in recognizing temperance and labor 
reform as branches of missionary work. It seems 
-impossible to get even a discussion of needed socio- 
logical revision of the creed in this vital matter. 
When the Reform Bureau was promoting a di- 
vorce bill for the District of Columbia, which 
embodied the law of Christ, with re-marriage al- 
lowed only in cases of adultery and only to the 
innocent party, the writer appealed to the Metho- 
dist, Baptist and Presbyterian ministers' meetings 
of Philadelphia to endorse it. The Methodists and 
Baptists did so unanimously, and the Presbyterian 
preachers heard the same appeal with manifest signs 
of general approval, but it was recalled that the 
Confession allowed absolute divorce for desertion, 
and the bill was committed to a committee for 
quiet burial — a case where the "dead hand" kept a 
great church out of a successful battle to crown 



22 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

Christ by making his law the law of the nation's 
Capital. 

THE REMEDIES FOR LAX DIVORCE. 

The remedy for divorce must include more 
than law, and must go deeper than law, starting 
with reverent sex lessons taught by experts in the 
schools. It is too delicate a subject for bunglers, 
even though they be parents, and it is worse than 
useless to urge every parent to unveil the sacred 
mysteries of sex. It is like work on a costly vase 
where every touch must be one of masterful psych- 
ology. When young people of marriageable age 
are so taught, and cease to talk of marriage as 
"midway between a joke and a crime/' we shall 
have reached the deep roots of the divorce evil. 
The law is also our schoolmaster, as the Bible re- 
minds us, and the mightiest lesson on the sacredness 
of marriage for old and young is the law of Christ 
on the statute books, proclaiming that marriage is 
more than an experimental contract — a sacred union 
that can be dissolved only by death, or by that 
criminal lust that murders love. 

To make the laws of Christ the laws of this world 
is the way to make Christ the King of this world. 
That is what legislative work signified to Dr. 
Frances E. Willard, who opened the very holy of 
holies of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union 
when she said, "Our absorbing purpose is to make 
Christ King of our camps and courts and com- 
merce." Whenever some fraction of the law of 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 23 

Christ is made an act of government, legislative or 
executive, let us count it but one more gem set in 
the earthly crown of Christ, and sing, 

"Bring forth the royal diadem 
And crown Him Lord of all." 



24 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 



II. 

LYNCHINGS, LABOR RIOTS AND 
MUNICIPAL MISRULE. 

The unity in these three national perils is that 
they all imperil not only or chiefly person and 
property, but the very foundations of government 
and civilization, and so are kindred to treason. To 
appeal to "Judge Lynch," or to share in a riot, or 
corrupt a city government is as much worse than 
common murder as was the act of Benedict Arnold, 
which everybody remembers when every murderer 
of his day is forgotten. 

A lynching should always be considered not as 
an attack on some one person — usually one poor 
and defenseless — but as an attack on the whole 
community. It is anarchy in a worse form than 
even the assassination of a king, for it stabs popu- 
lar government to the heart. It enthrones the mob, 
which is worse than absolute monarchy. 

The excuses commonly made for lynching will 
none of them stand the test of facts. Even Presi- 
dent Roosevelt once voiced the fallacy that lynch- 
ing is born of leniency. But it is just in those 
cases where the penalty is severest, and surest to 
be inflicted, that the lynchings have been most fre- 
quent and most barbarous. The usual legal pen- 
alty for rape in the southern states is death, and 
there is no danger that a negro will escape justice 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 25 

by the tricks known to high-priced lawyers. The 
leniency that is most closely related to lynching is 
leniency in punishing lynchers for their willful 
murders. 

Lynching is one of the offenses of which Ameri- 
cans have almost a monopoly. In no other nation 
of the world does "Judge Lynch" execute more 
than all the civilized courts. In 1908 the number 
legally executed in the whole nation was but 92, 
the number lynched was 100, of whom all but 
seven were negroes, and all but three were lynched 
in the south, and only 12 for "assault" and 12 more 
for "attempted assault." Murder was the reason 
assigned in 34 cases. With moral certainty that the 
negro murderer would be swiftly tried, and if found 
guilty surely executed, the mob itself committed 
murder, manifestly not to satisfy a "sense of jus- 
tice" but a brutal thirst for blood and vengeance, 
suggesting how thin is the veneering we have as yet 
put on the white savagery of our European an- 
cestors. 

There are in the south many strong voices de- 
manding the extinction of lynching and a return to 
the old Anglo-Saxon sense of respect for law and 
order, and the best help that those of other sections 
can render is to recognize and re-enforce these 
tribunes of civilization. 

LABOR RIOTS IN THE NORTH 

often differ from a southern "lynching bee" only in 
that their destruction of life and property is whole- 



26 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

sale rather than retail. I do not forget that labor is 
often wronged, but there is no excuse for bullets 
when labor has thousands of ballots against the few 
in the hand of the masters. Why do not American 
workmen do as wiser labor forces have done in 
Great Britain and Australia — send manly represen- 
tatives to legislatures and work out their own sal- 
vation by the orderly processes of law? Returning 
from Australia, where five million dollars of added 
wages had just been awarded to the sheep-shearers 
by the courts, it seemed like barbarism to en- 
counter labor riots at Vancouver and just across 
our line in the state of Washington, and at Butte 
to find it impossible to telephone because of a strike. 
The giant Public is choked by pigmy Labor on one 
shoulder and pigmy Capital on the other to compel 
him to take sides in what has long been ingenuous- 
ly called "the struggle of Capital and Labor," when 
it would be more accurate to call it strangulation 
of the public by capital and labor, for there are 
three parties involved, and it is about time the larg- 
est should insist that its stranglers shall settle their 
quarrels at the ballot box and in the courts as other 
countries have learned to do. The thirty labor 
members of the British Parliament unitedly pledge 
themselves to abstinence during their Parliamentary 
service, and vote solidly against intoxicating drinks 
and opium, standing not for one class but for jus- 
tice to all. When the writer spoke in Adelaide, 
South Australia, the Labor Premier, Hon. Thomas 
Price, who had helped as a stone-cutter to build the 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 27 

capitol in which he governed, presided fearlessly 
at an anti-gambling, anti-alcohol meeting. I called 
the attention of Speaker Thomas B. Reed, of the 
United States House of Representatives, when in- 
terviewing him with a labor deputation in behalf 
of an Industrial Commission on which labor was to 
be represented, to the strange fact that while labor 
had influential delegations in the Parliament of 
the British monarchy and in Australian parlia- 
ments, there was not one "representative'' of 
labor, elected as such, in even the popular House 
of our republic. With mock indignation he ex- 
claimed, "Don't you know we are all champions of 
labor when we are not championing the soldier?" 
Labor must learn to defend its true interests by 
sending some John Burns to the House, some 
Shaftsbury to the Senate, for the "strike," which 
per se is only a united refusal to work when no 
contract is in the way, in reality is often a violation 
of contract, and is almost never free from some 
form of intimidation, and in such cases is a belated 
survival of barbarism that "must go." And 
capital must also be held to just dealings by the 
courts. 

THE SHAME OF OUR CITIES. 

In reality the quieter crimes of municipal misrule 
are worse than lynching and labor riots by so much 
as a chronic disease is worse than "a fit of sickness." 
A recent writer has condensed the sickening revela- 
tions of boodling and graft that with painful same- 



28 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

ness have been uncovered by investigations in New 
York, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Chicago, Milwaukee, 
St. Louis, San Francisco and many other cities, into 
one black sentence, "Our cities are ruled by organ- 
ized criminals," and of the two sets into which these 
criminals are divided, "the peasant saloonkeepers 
from Europe" who run our city councils and take 
bribes, and the rich American owners of public 
utilities who bribe them, the latter are by far the 
worse. 

In this whole matter of municipal misrule our 
country is immeasurably the worst of all. No ut- 
terance is quoted with such frequency and unanim- 
ity when our patriotic business men gather from all 
over the land for national municipal reform con- 
ventions, as the words of Hon. Andrew D. White, 
who knew Europe well as American ambassador 
to several foreign courts : "The worst governed 
city of Europe is better governed than the best gov- 
erned city of America." The saying is usually ap- 
plied to the big cities, but the writer in twenty-one 
years of almost constant travel, with "six beds a 
week" in his reform lecture schedule three-fourths 
of the time, has found the smaller cities about as 
bad as the big ones — the mayor usually bad, or 
goodish, or goody, or good for nothing, like the peo- 
ple that elected him by sins of omission or commis- 
sion ; the police walking like blind men in the midst 
of open and habitual violations of law by saloons 
and shows and newsdealers ; the merchants afraid 
of a boycott more than of the ruin of their boys ; the 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 29 

preachers, save a brave few — mostly in small 
churches — "dumb dogs" while their flocks are being 
decimated by wolves ; the fighting of evil left by 
unmanly men in the churches largely to a few 
women, God's rich poor, of the divine order of the 
white ribbon. Speaker Reed, whom I have already 
quoted, said to me one day, when the unspeakable 
government of New York was being revealed with 
its hands filled with the harlot's gold: "You 
would be surprised to know how many respectable 
men want a city to have such a government that they 
can take a day off now and then to go to hell, and 
not be 'molested." 

In a national municipal reform convention at 
Cleveland, I remember how almost every delegate 
seemed to be claiming that his city was most mis- 
ruled of all; but the foot of the class was unani- 
mously awarded to Cincinnati on the story of one 
of its delegates that the city "boss," finding it hard 
to persuade a citizen to be his candidate for mayor, 
carried his point by saying, "If you will stand, you 
may name your opponent" That is not the only 
city where a corrupt ring, with bi-partisan positions 
to trade with, has controlled both machines. The 
worst obstacle to municipal reform is that so many 
even in the churches consider that the city's business 
and politics and pleasures belong to the devil by 
"squatter sovereignty," not having so much as heard 
that there is a "holy city coming down from God out 
of heaven." When I telegraphed that I was coming 
to speak on that theme on an Easter evening in a 



30 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

Nebraska city, the telegraph operator having occa- 
sion to telephone it to the preacher, and having the 
usual conviction as to the devil's mortgage on the 
city, sent it in this wise : "The theme for Sunday 
night is 'The Holy City,' and Crafts is coining 
down." One of the eccentricities of our city gov- 
ernment is that a majority of the "dry" towns I have 
visited have had "wet" mayors. The people order 
the wolves out of the fold, and then appoint one or 
more wolves to execute the order. This comes of 
dragging national politics into city elections, which 
might as appropriately be fought on the candidates' 
views of the canals of Mars. 

There was something of a "reform wave" in 
law enforcement in 1907 and 1908, largely due, as a 
Democratic mayor in the west said to me, to the 
example of the chief executive, President Roose- 
velt, but it was only a "wave," and not much of a 
wave at that. The radical remedy for the misrule 
of our cities, I believe, is not in organizing another 
government within the government in the form 
of a law and order league, that seeks to enforce 
law with both criminals and officials in opposition, 
but in the stern exclusion of national politics from 
city elections and the union of all clean men for a 
clean city. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 31 



HI. 

SABBATH DESECRATION, IMPURE SHOWS 
AND YELLOW JOURNALISM. 

There is small comfort in the fact that we have 
found at last two evils in which some other nations 
are as badly off as ourselves. France, even though 
it adopted a Sunday law in 1907, forbidding general 
traffic on that day, allows amusement venders and 
all dissipations full play, including Sunday horse 
races, which our "smart set" abroad ostentatiously 
patronize, in rank disloyalty to what DeTocqueville 
considered the most distinctive American institution. 
This disloyalty is appearing of late in the nation's 
capital also, where very high American officials are 
adopting the continental custom of Sunday dinner 
parties. What is worse, there is no chorus of fear- 
less rebukes from pastors or religious press. This 
is not surprising for with many preachers custom 
has taken the place of conscience. For example, 
the Presbyterian General Assembly that gath- 
ered in New York filled appointments all 
about New York by Sunday trains. If a church 
with Scotch roots does this, what need to tell 
what other do ! It was a Baptists preacher, then 
in Baltimore, who in introducing me on a Sunday 
night to speak on Sabbath observance, told his peo- 
ple he had come all the way from Annapolis (where 
he had preached in the morning) to hear my dis- 



32 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

course on Sabbath reform — which proved to be 
chiefly against Sunday trains. In Los Angeles, hav- 
ing on a Saturday persuaded a leading citizen, whose 
guest I was, to accept the next day the presidency 
of a new Sabbath association, he met me as I came 
to the parlor before breakfast with the stately grace 
of a gentleman of the old school and presented me 
the Sunday paper as a fitting courtesy for the new 
president of the Sabbath association to extend to 
the lecturer on Sabbath reform. Had his mind been 
alert he would have seen that with a Sunday paper 
in his hand he could not consistently condemn any 
form of Sunday work or traffic or amusement; for 
it represents the work of professional men, the edi- 
tors ; of skilled mechanics, the printers ; of carriers, 
the trainmen and expressmen; of merchants, the 
newsdealers; of hucksters, the newsboys; of amuse- 
ment venders, being sold in large part for amuse- 
ment. 

Here is the answer to the shallow claim that "it is 
the Monday paper that causes the most Sunday 
work." Possibly it does in production, though it 
need not, for Horace Greeley made the best Monday 
paper this country has ever seen with no Sunday 
work, save in two years of the Civil War when he 
issued a Sunday edition as a "war measure" ; but 
it is the distribution of a metropolitan paper that 
requires by far the larger part of the work, and that 
part which most interferes with the rest and worship 
appropriate to this day of God and man. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 33 

While thousands of reformers are fighting intem- 
perance, a half dozen Sabbath defenders are fighting 
some desperate rear guard skirmishes for that im- 
perilled institution. Pastors should see that Sab- 
bath defense is pre-eminently their job, though it is 
scarcely less the job of the true champions of labor. 
No one talks of a Sabbath reform "wave," and other 
reforms cannot long gain while this loses, for the 
Sabbath is the spiritual "water supply" of all moral 
forces. 

It is said that a Hebrew commercial traveller, on 
finding no churches in the town which he had just 
entered for business, left by the first train, refusing 
to sell to any customer on credit in such a place. 
Every leader of morals and of statesmanship recog- 
nizes the meaning of such a story, namely, that the 
Church is the chief of police, and must be relied 
upon more than any and all other forces for the 
development of honesty and other personal and so- 
cial virtues. 

The Church therefore has a right to appeal to the 
state to remove all unnecessary obstacles to the 
fundamental work which it is expected to do, the 
production of honesty and good morals; and particu- 
larly has the Church a right to insist on the enforce- 
ment of Sunday laws, usually far from strict, zvhen 
such violations, as in case of Sunday bar-rooms, 
draw azuay from the churches the very element of 
the population most needing moral influence, not 
alone to save their souls in heaven, but to save them 
from vice and crime. 



34 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

Every citizen who believes that the influence of 
the Church on the whole tends to diminish crime and 
promote social welfare should in some way co- 
operate with the Church. It is no doubt largely 
because this aspect of the case has been overlooked 
that so many reputable citizens have entirely de- 
serted the churches. It should be remembered when 
the temptation to desert the churches is strongest, in 
the summer, that these months are the very ones 
when vice and crime reach their high tide; and 
surely neither the individual citizen nor the state can 
afford to neglect any means to better this serious 
condition, not alone for God's sake, but for man's 
sake. In all seasons of the year for social welfare, 
if for no other reason, a good citizen should be a 
church-goer, and the state should enforce the laws. 

WHITE SLAVERY. 

We are not the worst country in the world in im- 
purity, but we must turn to dying France again to 
find a worse case among the nations of Christendom. 

Great interest has been aroused by monstrous 
revelations of systematic traffic in girls, and national 
and even international law is being enacted against 
this "white slavery." But the radical reformer will 
remember that few women can be thus enslaved 
against their determined resistance, and reflect that 
the effective remedy must be applied to the foul 
shows and corrupt literature and street roving at 
night by which our youth are chiefly seduced. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 35 

Here again is a reform for whose promotion there 
is no adequate organization outside the churches.* 
Nor should this safeguarding of the children of our 
Sunday schools be shirked by their regular 
"guardians." 

In Detroit, almost opposite three of the largest 
churches, Methodist, Baptist and Episcopal, in a 
newsroom window that hundreds of the children of 
those congregations regularly passed and repassed 
going to and returning from Sunday school, and 
many of them on week days also, I saw magazines 
and papers whose obscenity had been more than 
once condemned by the courts, which a word from 
one of the pastors or Sunday school superintendents 
or teachers might have removed months before, as 
they were removed that day by a brief word of mine. 
Right opposite a Presbyterian church in a New 
England city I saw some of these foul periodicals 
such as are excluded from all railway lines, that 
were calculated to do the children of its Sunday 
school more harm coming and going than they could 
sandwich good between. In a Pennsylvania city I 
saw such papers and magazines exposed in a church 
basement that had been rented for a newsroom. I 
have even found it necessary to ask the removal of 
such mental poison from two religious book stores, 
and from one rented from a religious association, 
and yet more frequently from shops kept by pro- 



*The strongest purity organizations are the National 
Purity Federation, H. B. Treadwell, President, La Crosse, 
Wis., and the National Vigilance Committee, Dr. O. 
Edward Janney, Chairman, Baltimore, Md. 



36 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

fessedly Christian men. In cleaning the newsrooms 
in a Pennsylvania town — my usual Saturday night 
recreation — I found as proprietor in one place the 
Sunday school superintendent of a Methodist 
church where I was to speak the next day — not a 
wilfully bad man but one of those who use the 
head only for a hat rack. He had sold anything and 
everything the news company sent him, never asking 
what its effect would be upon young or old. In 
another city the two newsdealers who were corrupt- 
ing the youth and would not stop, even when ap- 
pealed to, were Baptists, whose pastor lacked the 
nerve to compel them to desist or do their evil work 
outside the church. In another case I found it nec- 
essary to clean out twice the book store kept by the 
clerk of the First Presbyterian Church. Worse 
than that, in one city the wholesale agency which 
supplied the literature to book stores and newsrooms 
that many a criminal's confession has shown to be 
the seed of vice and crime, was managed by a- firm 
made up of a Presbyterian elder and an officer of a 
Methodist city evangelization society. They con- 
fessed that the sale of foul literature was unpleasant 
business, and wished someone would, by a case in 
court, compel the national company of which they 
were agents to cease sending the vile stuff, but they 
lacked the courage to risk the loss of a lucrative 
business by refusing to be panderers to passion, and 
their pastors and the public lacked courage to "make 
it hard for them to do wrong." 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 37 

It should be said that "the arrest of thought" is 
usually all that is necessary to clean a town of this 
corrupting literature, for the profits in selling it 
are so small, and the penalties are so large, that 
when the latter are brought to notice, few dealers 
will take such large risks for such small gains. And 
in many cases, too, "evil is wrought for want of 
thought" because few know or seem to care what 
the law is, or what is bought even by youth in the 
the sensitive age of adolescence. 

But the most amazing neglect of "home protec- 
tion" by child guardians in home and church and 
public schools is the toleration of the current the- 
atrical plays and picture shows. The former the 
Chicago Tribune has said were "never so bad since 
the age of the Stuarts." Archbishop Farley has de- 
clared them to be the worst public exhibitions since 
the fall of Rome. During the months of January 
and February, 1910, the children's committee of the 
Humane Society, of Cleveland, Ohio, conducted 
a personal investigation of moving picture shows in 
that representative city. They report that 40 per 
cent of the films shown are objectionable from the 
standpoint of child psychology. The committee, 
composed of Rev. Worth M. Tippy, Father Francis 
T. Moran, Police Prosecutor Cull, Jas. R. Garfield, 
ex-Secretary of the Interior, President Howe, of 
Case School, Matilda L. Johnson, of the Visiting 
Nurse Association, and Drs. W. H. Kinnicutt, Fran- 
ces Konrad and R. A. Bolt, obtained detailed written 
reports on 75 moving picture shows. 



38 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

In all 250 different films were seen. The 40 per 
cent of objectionable matter was distributed as fol- 
lows: 

Stealing 13.4 per cent 

Murder 13.1 per cent 

Drunkenness 13.1 per cent 

Indecent suggestion 8.2 per cent 

Housebreaking 7.2 per cent 

Loose ideals of marriage 6.5 per cent 

Domestic infidelity 5.8 per cent 

Vicious mischief 5.8 per cent 

Suicide in three films. Kidnapping in two films. 

In three instances, cases of the illegal employment 
of children in theatrical exhibitions were found. It 
was also found that indecent or vulgar suggestions 
were liable to appear in connection with illustrated 
songs or vaudeville features. 

Sanitation in 50 per cent of the places was re- 
ported not good, the most common fault being poor 
ventilation. 

The total audience of these plates in the evenings 
at the time visited, amounted to 10,000, of whom 
2100 or 20 per cent, were estimated to be children 
under 18 years of age. 

The failure to protect our young against these at- 
tacks on their innermost life falls short of the 
instinct of beasts, and is the more incredible because 
the reform of shows is the easiest, simplest, quickest 
of all reforms, inasmuch as the mayor or burgess 
of every town has absolute control of all rxhibitions, 
as numerous newspaper instances have reminded 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 39 

every man and woman who can read. In the face 
'of the fact that every mayor could close any show, 
and would if a few pastors and parents insisted on it 
— indeed often acts on the plea of a passing 
stranger — these schools of vice and crime go on, 
offering trips to hell for the nickel every child in 
these days has at hand to use as he will, while Sun- 
day school teachers chatter by the hour over picnics 
and Christmas trees and pink sociables. It is not 
Nero this time but Aquilla and Priscilla that are 
"fiddling while Rome burns." 

YELLOW JOURNALISM. 

The harm wrought by the type of sensational 
journalism that the world considers distinctively 
American is less sudden but more subtle than that 
of literature which boldly appeals to lust. The 
journal which is generally considered to be most 
representative of this type of newspapers, has in 
several lucid intervals which have seemed almost 
golden, suggested what a great syndicate of papers 
backed by millions might do for civic righteousness 
by its fearless attacks on cigarettes and Mormon 
polygamy and race gambling and the liquor traffic, 
against which last it hurled for years a series of 
cartoons and editorials unequalled in any daily paper 
of the world — whose teachings, alas, have since been 
belied by equally earnest advocacy of the other side. 
There are other yellow journals that have never for 
a day suggested gold but always dross. The excuse 
made by The Daily St. Vitus and The Daily Epilep- 



40 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

tic for their frantic type and "much ado about noth- 
ing," for their prying gossip and reeking scandals, is 
that they are inducing people to read who never read 
before. The claim reminds us of the quack doctor 
who could cure nothing but fits, and when a patient 
came with some other disease he proposed to throw 
him into fits and so get him around to a cure. This 
epileptic journalism, "erotic, neurotic and tommy- 
rotic," is getting on the nation's nerves and may 
presently be expected to get a name and a microbe 

all to itself as a national disease. It is no trifling 
matter to have truth and fact trifled with in the 

telling of every day's history to millions of people, 

young ar_d old. It is a very serious matter that the 

grand lessons of great histories are left unread by 

the vast majority of our people because of the 

newsboy's incessant and imperative appeal to their 

curiosity. It is like substituting red peppers for 

bread and meat in a nation's daily diet. 

But it is not enough to denounce trashy literature. 

The professional men of literary culture in a town 

should set themselves to allure the people to the pure 

and popular books, never so numerous as now, 

which could be done by popular talks on such books, 

with winsome extracts, every Saturday evening at 

the public library. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 41 



IV. 

BRUTAL SPORTS, JUDICIAL MALADMINIS- 
TRATION, GRAFT, AND GENERAL 
LAWLESSNESS. 

The relation to each other of these four clouds 
in our national sky may not be apparent at first, 
but nearly all our prize fights have been flagrant 
violations of law, which have nevertheless been 
permitted not only by executives catering to the 
brutal vote, but also, in some cases, by judges who 
have pretended to see only a boxing match in what 
everybody else knew was a prize fight. And the 
maladministration of courts is yet more scandalous 
when it is not in the interest of a sporting club 
looking for dollars, but a "trust" or "ring" of mill- 
ionaire grafters controlling government for their 
own enrichment rather than for the public good. 
These things together break down respect for law, 
and open the way for habitual law-breaking by 
citizens, and habitual non-enforcement of law by 
officials. "Graft" is the only one of these four evils 
in which our nation is not the worst, and we must 
go outside of Christendom to graft-cursed China 
for a worse case. 

THREE FIGHTS WITH PUGILISTS. 

It will be instructive to introduce here three pugi- 
listic events in which the writer was himself an un- 



42 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

announced fighter. In 1897, when pugilists had 
been driven from state to state until they seemed 
to have reached their last ditch in Nevada, the 
writer, on the announcement of the Carson fight, 
swiftly drew a bill to prohibit interstate transmis- 
sion of descriptions and pictures of prize fights, and 
immediately presented it to the Committee on Inter- 
state Commerce of the House of Representatives, 
with the result that the bill in manuscript and a 
favorable report on it reached the public printer on 
the same day, February 25, 1897. Senator Geo. F. 
Hoar also put the bill through the Senate Judiciary 
Committee in one week, but with the press limita- 
tions omitted, so that it only forbade interstate 
transmission of prize fight pictures. This news 
as to both bills was at once given to the press of the 
whole country, that a million men of the "Church 
militant" might support this prompt action of the 
Congressional committees with an irresistible volley 
of letters, which would overcome the opposition of 
the press to this damming up of brutal news, or at 
least prevent the reproduction of the fight in mov- 
ing pictures all over the land. 

Does the reader remember how every American 
pastor, on the Sunday night following, and again 
at the next prayer meeting, told his people the news, 
and how from the one-third of the nation on the 
church rolls — one-half of the adults — there went 
so many petitions, letters, telegrams and deputa- 
tions to senators and congressmen that the first and 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 43 

strongest bill was swept through to enactment in 
spite of the press? 

That is what should have happened, but not a shot 
for either bill that was not called for by a personal 
letter or petition form really came. Of preachers 
appealed to in such crises not more than a tenth 
respond, and many of them not until appeal after 
appeal has been sent, at great cost of time and 
money by the reform pickets at the front. Those 
who preach of courageous ancient prophets and 
apostles, when such an opportunity comes to trans- 
late the old Bible into a modern book of Acts, in 
the majority of cases, are too busy tithing their 
mint, anise and cummin, to attend to these "weight- 
ier matters of the law."* 



*When the bill to prohibit liquor selling in Pacific 
Islands having no civilized governments was pending in 
Congress, and another bill to prohibit liquor selling in 
government buildings, and other bills for Sunday rest and 
divorce reform and protection of girls, all lagging for lack 
of petitions and letters from the people, the writer remem- 
bered that Methodist presiding elders and district superin- 
tendents would visit every county and almost every town 
in the nation in their quarterly tour of churches, and so 
sent them petitions for these foreign and home missionary 
bills, with the suggestion that they could do a great 
Christian and patriotic service and at the same time illus- 
trate the civic value of Methodist polity by^devoting a few 
moments in each meeting they should hold to getting one 
or more petitions voted for these pending bills. About a 
thousand men could thus, without any expense in money 
and little in time, inform and arouse and express public 
sentiment all over the land, and assure the election of 
these great measures, that would make it "harder to do 
wrong and easier to do right" for a hundred years. Just 
one presiding elder responded with a promise to do as 
suggested, but I saw no evidence that he carried out his 



44 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

plan. The others did not even reply. And efforts to 
reach the same end by sending petitions to the bishops had 
little better success. And in 1910, three thousand letters 
sent to the "Pastor of the First Methodist Church" in each 
of the three thousand county seats of the United States, 
with petition blanks enclosed for voted endorsements of 
the Burkett-Sims anti-gambling bill and the McCumber- 
Tirrell and Johnson temperance bills, to be endorsed by 
vote, brought in two months just sixteen responses. To 
these and many others fifteen thousand sets of petition 
forms were sent, but two months later only eighty had 
been received of these and all other forms for all of these 
important bills. No church is more interested in reforms 
than the Methodist, and so these facts are typical of the 
neglect of civic duties by the churches at large. Of the 
174 American denominations hardly more than four have 
even a small representation in the Congressional Record's 
published list of petitions, as any one can see by spending 
an hour making a tally of a representative month. Nor is 
there any comfort to be found in the hope that the people 
are doing better in letters and telegrams. When race 
gamblers had captured the Pennsylvania Legislature and 
secured a unanimous vote on second reading for a bill to 
license gambling as a monopoly of New York and Phila- 
delphia milionaires, who would be enriched at the cost of 
morals and legitimate commerce alike if the bill should 
become a law, an appeal to the "President of the First 
National Bank" in every city of the State and to the Y. M. 
C. A. Secretary and W. C. T. U. President and to pastors 
to telegraph or write the governor, brought only 81 letters 
and twelve telegrams. Many of those who criticise Con- 
gress for not passing moral measures are themselves at 
fault, for they have never voted their fraction of public 
sentiment for any moral measure whatever, and Congress 
naturally reasons that a bill for which there is no expressed 
public sentiment hasn't sufficient public sentiment behind it 
to secure enforcement if it were passed. More than twenty 
years of reform work has burned into the writer an ever- 
deepening conviction that the supreme reform is to con- 
vince pastors and churches that moral reform is not merely 
an incidental but a fundamental part of the church's duty, 
and should be so recognized all the way from the Sunday 
school and theological seminary to the foregn missionary 
field. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 45 

The opposition of the press was so terrifying to 
congressmen in this case that the man who intro- 
duced the bill was twice missing when there was 
opportunity to pass it. Again he sat at his desk 
with his head in his hands as if pondering retreat. 
From the galleries the writer watched the electric 
effect of two telegrams he had wired the preachers' 
meeting and Young Men's Christian Association of 
his home city to send him. The first one brought 
his head up, the second gave him a ■ battle face. 
But most of the congressmen got no telegrams from 
Christian constituents to steady them against the 
lightning that was pouring in from their home 
papers, determined not to lose the inane mouth- 
ings of the pugilists. The bill was sure to pass 
if it came to a vote, and it was "the order of the 
day," which nothing could displace except appro- 
priation bills. But those who were then — some of 
them are still — leaders of the House, moved to 
adjourn whenever this bill was reached and no 
appropriation bill was available to displace it, as 
the Congressional Record for the closing days of 
March, 1897, will show. And while the oft- 
adjourning House waited for some appropriation 
bill to come back from the Senate, one of these 
party leaders led in singing, what in such case was 
no better than swearing, 

"Our father's God, to Thee, 
Author of liberty, 
To Thee we sing." 



46 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

Some one called these dodgers "the House of 
Cowards," but they were literally the House of Rep- 
resentatives — fairly representing a majority even of 
church members, who showed no zeal for that 
measure of civic righteousness, and as a result pugi- 
lism has since flooded the whole country. 

I am glad to follow this story of the churches 
defeated, which was partly due to the fact that they 
had not been sufficiently taught the practical and 
social side of their duty, with another story in which 
the churches acquitted themselves more worthily. 
As the former incident shows "how not to do it,'* 
this one shows how the sovereign citizen may bring 
to book even a rebel mayor. 

The prize fighters, banished from every city or 
state where decent government was in the saddle, 
had selected the city of St. Paul as a safe place 
to break the law, and the sporting club in charge, 
with two leading editors as its chief officers, had 
erected a great pavilion and put up a guarantee of 
$3000 that the mayor would not enforce the law. 
He had allowed Sunday games and Sunday thea- 
ters and Sunday saloons to trample on the law so 
long that it seemed to be time for the lawlessness 
to overflow into the other days of the week. On 
the Saturday before the appointed festival of an- 
archy a handful of good citizens met and decided 
that some word of protest should go to the world, 
lest it should be thought that St. Paul's rebellion 
against the state laws was "by unanimous consent." 
They decided to call a citizens' protest meeting for 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 47 

Monday night. I had an appointment to speak on 
the "Imperiled Sabbath" on Sunday night in the 
First Presbyterian Church, at a union service of 
leading churches. The fact that lawlessness can 
not be allowed on Sunday without jeopardizing 
law and order on other days was emphasized, and 
pastors present urged their people to make "a dem- 
onstration in force" on Monday night. It had 
seemed up to Saturday night that no one cared what 
laws were broken, or at any rate that no one dared 
to object. But on Monday night, in the city's 
largest hall, the quiet "seven thousand that had not 
bowed the knee to Baal," the "plain people" who 
suddenly become a political "landslide" just when 
evil seemed to have crushed them out, were on hand, 
and the air was electric with courage. Men who 
had thoughtlessly participated in lawless Sunday 
games and shows, some of whom, no doubt, were 
also eager readers of the literary effusions of the 
pugilists in the sporting pages of the daily press, 
now that the issue was raised, were on the side of 
law. Resolutions, enthusiastically adopted, repudi- 
ated the mayor who had consented to lawlessness, 
and appealed to Governor Meriam to take charge of 
the city. And the governor, though himself said to 
be of sporting proclivities, and though his own part- 
ner held the stakes in his own bank, ordered the 
sheriff, as the state's officer and the superior officer 
of the mayor in charge of the whole county, to 
prevent the fight. The sheriff in terror replied, "I 
would not dare to interpose without a thousand 



48 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

men." "You shall have them," said the governor. 
" Adjutant, call out the regiment." The mayor had 
threatened to fight the sheriff with his three thou- 
sand police, but as he saw the soldiers hurrying to 
their armory he thought better of his proposed re- 
bellion; and that study in civics showing the rela- 
tive powers of mayor, sheriff and governor, was 
completed in the early evening of the day set for 
the fight, when the soldiers marched through the 
streets and camped for the night in the pavilion 
that had been erected for a temple of anarchy. The 
writer's part in this "knock out" of pugilism was 
but slight, and even the governor's part was sec- 
ondary, for it was aroused Christian citizenship 
that won the day.* 

A third battle with pugilism, representative of 
many others, is at this writing a drawn battle. In 
Honolulu, in 1908, brutal pugilistic exhibitions were 
allowed by the district attorney to go on unchecked 
in spite of courteous appeals and vigorous protests 
of the preachers and other good citizens. The dis- 
trict attorney, while prosecuting criminals in the 
United States courts made a specialty in private 
practice of defending Chinese criminals in the Ter- 



*Public opinion has not yet won in the country at large 
in the war on pugilism nor has it fully won its fight 
against the wholesale brutality of football. The Central 
Christian Advocate, Jan. 12, 1910, gave this football record 
of manslaughter for sport in nine years, the first figure 
given in each case being the killed, the second the injured : 
1901, 7, 74; 1902, 15, 106; 1903, 14, 63; 1904, 14, 296; 
1905, 24, 200; 1906, 14, 160; 1907, 15, 166; 1908, 10, 272; 
1909, 30, 300. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 49 

ritorial courts, a thing so manifestly incongruous 
that it became a great scandal, especially when in a 
famous case the district attorney was at the same 
time the official prosecutor and private attorney of 
the same man. This matter was brought to the 
attention of the Roosevelt administration by Rev. 
E. W. Thwing, then the all-around reform leader 
of Honolulu, and long and costly investigation re- 
sulted in the resignation of this district attorney 
and the nomination by President Roosevelt, in the 
last hours of his term of office, of a successor satis- 
factory to the moral leaders of Hawaii, whose name, 
however, came before the Senate too late for con- 
firmation — with a senator in opposition — before the 
inauguration of his successor. No sooner had the 
new administration come in than the new Attorney 
General asked the accused district attorney to with- 
draw his resignation. He continued in office and 
the pugilists continued their brutalizing exhibitions. 
This illustrates how even a president finds it diffi- 
cult to apply good theories when powerful political 
influence blocks the way. But President Taft's oft- 
repeated declaration that "the administration of the 
criminal law in this country is a disgrace to our 
civilization" is nevertheless a reinforcement to the 
battle for court reform. This he asks Congress to 
cure by some law to correct the delays and defects 
of federal court procedure, but he should know 
from long experience in the courts that he can do 
still more for court reform by appointing strong 
judges and faithful district attorneys, who will use 



50 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

their full powers to correct abuses. Especially 
should he make it a condition of every appointment 
as district attorney that the incumbent shall not 
engage in private practice. The Clayton bill (pend- 
ing in Congress as we go to press) would do that 
by law. And the president might well put in gold 
for presentation to all new judges, the dictum of 
an Indiana judge, who had before him a flagrant 
evasion of a new anti-gambling law, forbidding 
racing for more than fifteen days a year on any 
track. A racing association, which had previously 
raced forty-five days a year on one track, bought 
additional land and developed three tracks, all in 
sight of each other, and all owned by the same men, 
though incorporated under three different names, 
with the offices shifted about. They raced fifteen 
days on each track, forty-five in all, as before — a 
manifest plot to nullify the law. The attorney for 
the defense protested that the court had no right 
to assume from these proved facts that any fraud 
was intended. To which the judge replied: "There 
is nothing in the law requiring a judge to abdicate 
his common sense." 

GRAFT WORSE THAN PUGILISM. 

Apparently many judges who allow such tricks 
to defeat justice need to have that decision brought 
to their attention, especially those who have to deal 
with lawyers who sell their talents to rich grafters 
to keep their stealings within the letter of the law. 

In the first convention of the National Federation 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 51 

of Churches (The Federal Council of the Churches 
of Christ in the United States) I drafted in the 
lobby all the ethical resolutions adopted on gambling, 
impurity and "graft." When the word "graft" was 
read, some one in the audience objected that it was 
slang, and some other word should be substituted ; 
but the bishops and leaders of nineteen millions of 
church members could find no substitute. "Graft" 
is the brand of Cain, not on boodling or bribery, not 
on any violation of law, but on the deep crime 
against society of using public office as a "private 
snap" rather than a "public trust." When the citi- 
zens' personal ballots as well as public offices are 
regarded as patriotic trusts by our youth, under 
faithful teaching, we shall have cut the roots of the 
most subtle treason. 

THE NATIONAL HABIT OF LAW BREAKING. 

Law-breaking is so common that an audience is 
startled and surprised when told how many things 
that are going on openly every day are plain viola- 
tions of law. For example, Sunday trains and Sun- 
day papers usually were at the start, and many of 
them are still, violations of law. When the re- 
former whose testimony is being given to the grand 
jury of the public in this volume spoke in the Penn- 
sylvania Legislature in defense of the best of the 
Sabbath laws, the distinguished editors of Phila- 
delphia Sunday papers most ingenuously plead with 
the legislature to legalize what they were doing, so 
confessing publicly that it was a crime, and yet they 



52 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

intimated no purpose to obey the law if the legis- 
lature should decide to continue it, but rather that 
in any case expected to go on with their weekly 
violations of law just the same. When I was in the 
Adirondacks, summering in the same bark camp 
with the family of an eminent judge, the question 
was raised one day whether it were not the "closed 
season" for certain fish, at which the jurists' house- 
hold, in chorus, protested against looking up the 
matter. And the forest warden and constable 
shortly came into camp bringing a young doe they 
had illegally killed in the closed season for deer, 
while themselves policing the forest to prevent 
others from doing the same. On a visit to Colum- 
bus, Ohio, I inquired at the city hall about a curfew 
law, of whose enactment there by the city council 
I had read months before. The city officers had to 
look it up in the books, for it had never been en- 
forced, and on reporting all this in a church and 
asking how many parents had enforced it, I learned 
that this wise law had been generally disobeyed 
because no policeman's club had compelled the 
children of Christians to observe it. 

In our cities we might well omit all other planks 
from the municipal platform for a year or two ex- 
cept the one old Anglo-Saxon principle, "Obedience 
to law," which we cannot much longer neglect with- 
out very serious results. All laws should be en- 
forced, that bad ones may be repealed, imperfect 
ones amended, and good ones utilized. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 53 

The thirteen clouds in our sky that I have dis- 
cussed, and others to which I have referred, are 
not the whole list. There are no perils more seri- 
ous chan the fallen family altar, the childless family 
pew, and the failure of the Church to grip the lives 
of nine-tenths of our young men. 



54 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 



V. 

CO-OPERATION OF CHURCH AND STATE 
TO REMOVE THE CLOUDS. 

These clouds should be the "chief concern" of 
church and state, each in its appropriate sphere — 
the one now too much confined to individualism, the 
other to commercialism. 

In the fifteen years since a "Christian lobby" was 
established at Washington, Congress has acted two 
hundred times in the interest of moral reform in 
small and large matters, counting votes of both 
Houses and votes also of committees and hearings 
granted and printed, on moral issues — a record un- 
precedented in any previous period, and due largely 
to the fact that reform legislation is no longer "no- 
body's business," but is looked after by legislative 
superintendents of the International Reform 
Bureau, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 
the Anti-Saloon League, and the Good Templars. 

But I should not be true to the facts if I gave 
the impression that anything like adequate attention 
is given by government, at Washington or elsewhere, 
to the great moral issues which history shows to be 
the real questions of life and death to nations. In 
all branches of American government money meas- 
ures have the right of way, and moral measures 
are mostly side-tracked unless legislators can be 
assured that the battle has been fought out behind 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 55 

the scenes, and the bill desired will go through with 
only a moment taken from commercialism. Our 
victories are mostly in amendments, the reformer's 
strategic use of the "side-door." Congress will 
generally vote right when it has to vote — let us be 
thankful for that — and so when a germane amend- 
ment in the interest of morals can be attached to 
some political or financial or military measure, it 
usually passes. By such flank movements, the Dis- 
trict of Columbia divorce law, the Sabbath closing 
provisions for the St. Louis and Jamestown fairs, 
the first and second anti-canteen laws, the banish- 
ment of bars from immigrant stations and the capi- 
tol and the soldiers' homes, were all carried. The 
percentage of time given by Congress to morals is 
infinitesimal. In the legislative feast it is only a side 
dish. The Senate has no committee on morals, and 
the House only one, the last and least of all, the 
Committee on the Alcoholic Liquor Traffic, made 
up mostly of new men who could not get on any 
other committee. A former chairman of that com- 
mittee told the writer he "would rather be the tail 
end of the Appropriation Committee — he would 
walk to New York to get that promotion." The 
ruling passion found expression in a Washington 
elder's prayer, who having in mind Christ's sacri- 
ficial propitiation for our sins, thanked God he had 
"made an appropriation for our sins." Moral re- 
form is treated by Congress as a distant, poor 
relation of politics that cannot be wholly ignored — 
must have a crumb now and then. As a defeated 



56 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

candidate for the presidency put it, "We must oc- 
casionally pander to the religious element." 

THE CHURCHES ONLY BEGINNING TO 
ADOPT MORAL REFORMS. 

When the writer, in an address in 1903 to the 
New York Presbyterian ministers' meeting, gave 
the foregoing picture of moral reform sitting like 
Lazarus at the door of Congress, there was a broad 
smile that recalled the Pharisee's congratulation that 
he was "not as this publican." Whereupon I said : 
"The twin of that Temperance Committee of 
Congress is the Temperance Committee of the Pres- 
byterian Assembly — less than the least of all its 
boards, whose annual meeting at the Assembly in 
this city last year, when doctrinal creed revision 
drew crowds, had only two Assembly commissioners 
in attendance, and only thirty-six in the whole 
audience." 

When the same address was given the next week 
at the New York Baptist ministers' meeting, they 
smiled at Congress, and laughed at the Presbyter- 
ians. Whereupon I said : "The Presbyterian Church 
is the only one that has even a feeble Temperance 
Committee." 

Since then the Presbyterian Committee has been 
much strengthened and now employs several strong 
lecturers, and maintains an influential office in Pitts- 
burg; the Baptists have formed a Temperance 
Committee that supports one lecturer ; and there are 
six other denominational committees that send out 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 57 

some literature and are represented as constituents 
of the Interchurch Temperance Federation at its 
annual meeting — all of which slight recognitions that 
moral reform should be a regular branch of church 
work suggest that the Careys of today are laying 
the keel of another "forward movement." 

The Christian Endeavor societies have long had a 
Christian Citizenship Committee — only the annex of 
an annex as yet. And a few of the local missionary 
societies have a "temperance secretary" to fight the 
chief obstacle to missions, the white man's rum and 
opium. And the battle against Mormon polygamy 
was led for years by the Woman's Home Mission- 
ary societies. By and by the new organizations of 
men in the churches will find "a man's job" in home 
protection. Savages, though they turn the hard 
work on the women, themselves do the fighting. 
We have been accustomed to put both the church 
work and the moral warfare on the women. When 
men's leagues make moral reform a regular branch 
of church work, the retreat of moral forces, which 
all the outside reform societies have been able only 
to slacken, will be turned into a retreat for the 
other side. 

A country cemetery has the following notice over 
the gate : 

"Only the dead who live in the parish are 
buried here." 

Alas, there are "dead" that "live" in every parish. 
They must be awakened to the great duties of the 
hour. The church must take up the new tasks for 



58 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

her own sake, as well as for God's sake, and the 
world's sake. 

They say an ocean steamer will run five miles on 
momentum after the steam is turned off. That 
seems to be the way many churches are running 
just now. The old impulses are turned off, and 
new ones are not yet turned on. There are some 
preachers who need just such an awakening as 
occurred when a good old Methodist sister, whose 
pastor was about to leave, came to the parsonage 
in tears, to whom he said: "It's all right, Mother 
Smith; I shall go somewhere else and do good, and 
the Lord will send you a better preacher." At this 
her tears burst out afresh, and she exclaimed: 
"They've all said that for forty years, but it gets 
worse every time." 

The preacher who succeeded the writer in a 
Brooklyn pastorate, on meeting one of his parish- 
ioners, said, "How are you?" "Oh," said the lay- 
man, "I'm fairly well; nothing the trouble with me 
but corns; and I never think of them except when 
I am in church and have nothing on my mind." 
Much of the "holy ambiguity" of current preaching 
is not interesting enough to practical men to keep 
their minds off their corns. Preachers must them- 
selves get hold of the real meaning of life, and get 
it "on the minds" of their hearers. 

The Independent gives a report annually of the 
work of all denominations, each written by a leading 
man of the denomination described. In a recent 
year I found in a careful reading of all these reports 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 59 

not a word about anything done for morals save 
in the article on the Salvation Army. Some ethical 
work had been done in all churches, but in the 
opinion of their own leaders, "nothing to speak of." 

Has the church no duty in defense of the family 
against lax divorce and polygamy, that it should be 
left mostly to outside societies, to which not one in 
a hundred Christians contribute? Should it not be 
a part of the churches' work to defend the Sabbath 
unitedly, since their very life depends on preserv- 
ing the day? 

The Seventh Day Adventists, sixty-one thousand 
in number, impelled by the belief that the United 
States, by enacting a Sunday law for the national 
Capital such as is in force in all the States except 
California, would become "the third beast" of Reve- 
lation 13, were in January, 1910, sending to Con- 
gress more petitions against the Johnston Sunday 
bill than all the thirty-five million members of other 
churches were sending in behalf of that and all 
other bills. 

Is not the removal of the chief obstacles to mis- 
sions, liquors and opium, a primary concern of the 
church ? 

A century ago foreign missions had no regular 
place in the schedules of church work and benevo- 
lence. In a hundred years it will be as much a 
subject of wonder that at the opening of the twen- 
tieth century, with moral perils all about our 
Christian homes, most of the churches failed to 



60 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

recognize moral reform as a branch of missions — of 
foreign missions, of home missions, of city missions. 

GET RIGHT WITH GOD AND MAN. 

Hitherto the Church has been chiefly absorbed in 
righting man's relation to God. It has assumed that 
if that was done, man's relations to his fellows 
would right themselves. Past and current history 
disproves this theory. Speaking on this subject, a 
few years ago in a Pennsylvania city, on the Sun- 
day before election, the writer said : "The state 
that has not only the most religiousness but the most 
moral earnestness is the very one that is worst gov- 
erned of all. I shall not say what state I refer to, 
but if I should make the statement in any part of 
the land, the audience would think of the very state 
of which you are thinking." 

THE SUPREME REFORM IS TO ENLIST 
THE CHURCH IN REFORM. 

Charity has been recognized in the Church from 
the first in the "poor collection." It is truly the 
Miriam, the elder sister in the household of faith. 
But the Moses, the strong young child of Christian- 
ity, is moral reform. He is still in the bulrushes. 
Pharaoh's daughter, the Government, has not yet 
taken him in, nor has his mother, the Church, 
brought him home ; and God is saying to both, "Take 
this child and nurse it for Me." 

There is encouragement for those who believe that 
decisive victories in reform wait on the church, in the 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 61 

ethical action of the second convention of the Na- 
tional Federation of Churches, as compared with 
the first. In the first instance, as already stated, 
the writer was in attendance as a lobbyist, and he 
found unexpected resemblance between this re- 
ligious congress and the political body in whose 
lobby he had been active for years. Besides the 
resolutions which he sent in on gambling, impurity 
and "graft," which were adopted, as there was no 
one to oppose them, resolutions were urged in behalf 
of Sunday observance, prohibition and divorce. 
These three were rejected, apparently with the idea 
that nothing ethical should be passed except by unan- 
imous consent. A few backward churches, repre- 
senting a million or so of the nineteen millions in 
the constituency of the Federation of Churches, 
were not yet prepared to endorse prohibition, and so 
that must be cast aside. The Presbyterians had two 
grounds of divorce, and so nothing must be said 
about the law of Christ on that subject. And the 
Seventh Day Baptists were in the organization 
(though representing but a fraction of 1 per cent of 
the constituency) and so nothing must be said about 
observing the Lord's Day, though it was then seri- 
ously imperilled both in its religious and civic as- 
pects. 

Those who had been hoping that the Federation 
of Churches might take up effectively the reform 
work which was far too great a task for the Gideon's 
band that were enlisted in reform societies, saw in 
this failure of the Federation to act on anything 



62 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

except what all the churches were previously agreed 
upon, evidence that the outside societies, made up 
of front rank Christians of all churches, could not 
as yet, in the United States, turn over their ethical 
work to the churches. 

But the second meeting of the Federation 
made a far better record in this matter and its 
declarations on social and moral lines were like 
bugle calls, especially the resolutions on the labor 
question and the temperance question — in the latter 
case pointing directly to total abstinence for the in- 
dividual and total suppression of the saloon for the 
community. This meeting, with the still more pro- 
nounced action of the churches in Canada, where 
the period seems to be near when social reforms 
can all be turned over to the churches, suggests that 
the church will, during this twentieth century make 
as noble a record in reforms as it did in the nine- 
teenth century in foreign missions. 

CANADIAN CHURCHES LEADING IN MORAL AND 
SOCIAL REFORMS. 

The story of the action of Canadian churches is 
most instructive. The Methodist Church first, and 
later the Presbyterian Church, organized what is 
called in the latter case a "Department of Moral and 
Social Reform," which aims to promote social ethics 
in all lines through an employed denominational sec- 
retary and well-supported offices. These ' 'depart- 
ments" in the various denominations of Canada are 
united in a "Council of Moral and Social Reform" 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 63 

and in local councils, which, in the very name of 
the churches, conduct "No license" and anti-gam- 
bling campaigns. 

One reason why this can be done in Canada is 
because energy is not so much wasted as in the 
United States in maintaining microscopic sectarian 
divisions. In contrast to 174 denominations in the 
United States, nearly all of the Canadian churches 
are consolidated in six great organizations. And 
they often co-operate — one instance being in provid- 
ing interdenominational text books for training 
Sunday school teachers. 

The main argument in favor of the union or fed- 
eration of churches, or at least a system of comity, 
usually has been the waste caused by sectarian di- 
visions in missionary work, both in home and for- 
eign fields ; but to the sociologist, one of the chief 
objections to multitudinous sects is that the struggle 
for life crowds out the struggle for the life of 
others. One reason why Canada excels in Sabbath 
observance is that the churches have more energy to 
spare for this important battle than in the United 
States where so many churches are struggling for 
existence because of needless sectarian divisions. 
In the absence of this diversion of energy, the Cana- 
dian Departments of Moral and Social Reform, in 
1910 when this book went to press, were leading 
with good prospects of success, the national battle 
against race gambling, as they had previously car- 
ried to success a law prohibiting opium, and as they 



64 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

expect to take care of the problem of the "white 
slave" traffic* 

The united churches would also have been able, 
through their Moral and Social Reform Depart- 
ments, to take full charge of temperance and 
the Sabbath if vigorous "alliances" for these pur- 
poses had not been previously organized. 

Lest some Canadians should be too proud or self 
satisfied it ought to be noted here, that with a better 
Sabbath and only one-fourth the per capita liquor 
consumption of the United States, Canada had in 
1910 hardly begun to outlaw the saloon — Prince Ed- 
ward Island being the only prohibition province. 
In 1909, Peterboro, a city of 17,000 population was 
the largest city that even ventured to try for "No 
license." It fell short of the three-fifths majority 
unreasonably required. Inasmuch as all the Cana- 
dian provinces except Quebec have declared by 
plebiscites for prohibition, it looks very much as if 
the politicians in Canada had been able to cheat the 
Christian voters even more than in the United 
States, where a less religious but more strenuous 
people have secured more and better temperance 
legislation — one of many proofs that people need 
not only to "get right with God" but also to get 
"grit and gumption." 

*When the writer is asked for the best plan by which 
the churches and Christian societies of a city or town may 
unite for social regeneration — for developing the philan- 
thropic hemisphere of religion — he answers promptly : 
"Write to the Council of Moral and Social Reform of Can- 
ada, Rev. J. G. Shearer, D. D., Secretary, Confederation 
Life Building, Toronto, for its plan of work for local 
councils." 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 65 



VI. 

CAUSES OF THE CLOUDS. 

Whether the battle in the United States for social 
reform is to be carried on, as it should be, by the 
Church itself, or chiefly, for a while yet, by progres- 
sive Christians united in outside societies, the perils 
I have described must be faced, and increased ef- 
forts made to remove them. To escape the conse- 
quences of these evils we must study and remove 
the causes. Notwithstanding the familiarity of the 
proverb, "Prevention is better than cure," the pre- 
ventive work of reform gets a very small share of 
attention compared with the curative work of char- 
ity. People are much more ready to provide an 
ambulance for the valley than a fence for the cliff 
above. 

Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the founder of numer- 
ous charitable societies, who was wisely active also 
in legislative, and "law and order" work, confirmed 
in a letter to the writer his published statement that 
"if the other churches in Boston would take care of 
the poverty caused by drink, his church would take 
care of the remainder" — an impressive way of say- 
ing that to cut away the vices would be to destroy 
most of the poverty at its roots. 

Now what are the causes of the perilous clouds 
in our sky ? 



66 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

First, the Civil War, for war, whether just or not, 
always increases on both sides, intemperance, im- 
purity, Sabbath breaking and gambling, and lessens 
the sacredness of both life and property. Therefore 
we should "seek peace and pursue it," rather than 
invite more war, and so more vices, by multiplying 
warships and armies. Many have so shallow a view 
of ethics that they have more to say against the 
soldier's bottle than against his battles. Indeed, 
many ministers are unconsciously fostering the war 
spirit by the habitual use of military illustrations, 
such as give young people the impression that there 
is no courage worth mentioning except that of the 
warrior "amidst confused noise and garments rolled 
in blood." Militarism ought to be condemned as a 
sin in pulpits and Sunday schools and in Christian 
homes. Only by such fundamental treatment are we 
likely to do away with this "trade of barbarians." 
Only once has it been pictured more accurately — 
when Gen. Sherman said, "War is hell." 

The second cause of the clouds described is the 
beer invasion, which came in under cover of the 
Civil War, and filled the land with foreign saloons 
when we were too busy in another conflict to resist 
or even to study them. Beer is often accounted the 
least harmful drink, when for that very reason, 
partly, it has become the most harmful — the bridge 
over which eighty per cent of the drunkards go to 
the inebriate asylum and the prison. When a pastor 
in New York, the writer canvassed the Christian 
Home for Intemperate Men, and found that eighty 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 67 

per cent attributed their fall to beer. But recent 
discoveries show that the indictment against beer 
is not alone or chiefly that it ushers men to distilled 
liquors and in many cases to drunkenness, but 
rather that it injures body and mind when taken in 
the most moderate quantities. Professor Aschaffen- 
berg has proved that one ounce of alcohol a day in 
a bottle or less of pure wine or in three glasses or 
less of pure beer, taken dietetically at home, re- 
duces the work of typesetters, for example, one- 
tenth. 

This new temptation of the lager beer saloon 
came just when millions of the American people had 
been persuaded that distilled liquors were danger- 
ous and harmful — so much so that between 1845 
and 1855, every state east of the Rocky mountains 
and north of Mason and Dixon's line outlawed 
the bar, with the single exception of New Jersey, 
which for one year of "lucid interval" was under 
local option. When lager beer came in, with its 
insistent claim to be welcomed as "a temperance 
drink," the abolitionists of liquor were busy on the 
abolition of slavery, and so this new institution, the 
beer saloon, met with very little opposition. By 
the time the Civil War was over this new type of 
drinking resort was strongly intrenched as a new 
social institution, a loafing, treating, plotting resort, 
the center of bad morals and corrupt politics, which 
thousands who have no idea of giving up the drink 
are now outlawing as a social peril by their anti- 



68 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

saloon votes. It is a gain worth striving for, even to 
close the bars, though many will still use the beer. 

The third cause of the clouds was the flood of 
foreign immigration that rolled in upon us in a 
practically unrestricted tide, after the Civil War 
started it by the need of men to replace a million 
fallen heroes, and by the sudden opening in the 
closing days of the war, through the Pacific rail- 
roads, of our whole vast domain. 

This leads us directly to the fourth cause, the 
consequent development of our national ruling pas- 
sion of commercialism, by which so many strong 
men who had given their talents to the country at 
great sacrifice as leaders of anti-slavery politics and 
the war for the Union, thinking "the piping times 
of peace" gave them release, threw themselves, body 
and soul, into the unprecedented opportunities for 
money-making in this new country, then for the first 
time available for nation-wide exploitation. 

In close relation to this is the fifth cause, the con- 
trol of politics by a lower grade of men than had led 
the nation through the crisis of moral and military 
conflict. These smaller men, seeing that the big men 
had left politics to make more money, moved by a 
like commercialism, found new ways to make money 
in politics. City governments were turned into con- 
cerns through which franchise buyers could trade 
with "the peasant saloonkeepers from Europe" — the 
latter furnishing the sort of men for city councils 
that could be controlled by "boodle." 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 69 

The sixth cause, also directly related to the others, 
is the growth of impersonal, and so irresponsible 
corporations, which alone were adequate to handle 
the great enterprises of this newly opened country, 
and which in popular opinion, were "soulless" and 
therefore could neither cheat nor be cheated. 

Out of all this grew, in a very brief period, un- 
paralleled luxury, the seventh cause, for luxury has 
never failed to corrupt its second generation, which 
has proclaimed its degeneracy in such Babylonish 
feasts as the "Seeley Dinner" in New York and the 
"Monkey Dinner" in Newport. 

WHY IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION IS DEFEATED. 

Pausing now to consider some of these causes in 
detail, why has it been so hard to restrict excessive 
immigration by shutting out those who would be 
physically and morally a burden and a curse? The 
labor unions have advocated restriction in self de- 
fense, and have been seconded, in some degree, by 
the scholarly element. But reasonable restriction 
has been defeated again and again, sometimes in the 
national House of Representatives, sometimes in the 
Senate, and once in the White House. These de- 
feats have been mainly due to the combined influence 
of transportation companies and brewers, both of 
whom are willing to sacrifice the national interest 
for some small financial benefit. Brewers are but 
minor members of the alliance. When the brewers' 
chief agent in Congress failed to get the war tax 
removed from beer in the 57th Congress, he saw a 



70 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

three million appropriation for a railway station in 
Washington pass easily, and exclaimed, "Oh, if the 
brewers only had, passes !" This calls up the fact 
that the successful fight made by the writer against 
legalizing race gambling in Pennsylvania, to which 
previous reference has been made, opened up the 
secret that the real "boss" of Pennsylvania was its 
great railroad, without whose permission the great- 
est of political bosses could not have reigned a day. 
The railroad had been quoted as on the gamblers' 
side. I secured a verbal denial. When I found the 
governor unwilling to threaten a veto, as his prede- 
cessor had done, which would have saved a costly 
agitation, I said that the president of the great rail- 
road had been misquoted. Instantly the dull atmos- 
phere cleared, and he said : "You go to Philadelphia 
and get that in writing, and the bill is dead." 

The writer asked a prominent member of the 
Immigration Committee of the United States Sen- 
ate, a few years since, why we were getting no real 
restriction of the foreign invasion. His answer was 
short, but profoundly significant, and of wide appli- 
cation : "The transportation companies are very 
powerful." We must have government ownership 
of railroads ultimately if only to displace railroad 
ownership of government. This is a more vital 
question than the tariff, but one on which both 
parties are so compromised that it will require more 
courage than is common among politicians for any 
group of men to take it up in earnest. The writer 
was in the room of a leading member of the Senate 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 71 

Finance Committee, shortly after the death of Sen- 
ator Davis of Minnesota had made a vacancy in the 
chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. 
Senator Cullom was entitled to it, and desired it, 
but the clerk of the Finance Committee said : "Of 
course we can't let Cullom have it, for that would 
make Senator Chandler chairman of the Interstate 
Commerce Committee, and he is unfriendly to the 
railroads." So Senator Cullom had to wait until 
Senator Chandler was retired from the Senate. 

When I was about to speak of national issues at 
a Chautauqua in Nebraska's capital, Mr. William 
J. Bryan said to me : "Tell the audience that Ne- 
braska is the only state where the railroads do not 
dominate politics." He had made the remark with 
no sign of a smile, but when I repeated it to the 
audience there was a roar of laughter, under whose 
foam were the dregs of a well-known shame. 

The defeat of the Hepburn bill, to protect "No 
license" towns against brewers and distillers in 
other states who ship in liquors for "speak-easies" 
under the plea of "interstate commerce," was not 
due chiefly to the liquor dealers, who made an open 
fight, but more, we are informed by one of the 
committee in charge, to the railroads, for whose 
aiding and abetting of this "speak-easy" trade the 
bill provided new and severe penalties. 

Coming back to immigration restriction (the dis- 
cussion of which has led to a glance at railway 
domination of politics) we note .that of the immi- 
grants in America in 1904, more than twenty 



72 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

thousand were in insane asylums, and forty-four 
thousand were dependents in public institutions — 
many more outside. Five thousand of them were 
under life sentence. A much greater army of them 
were running saloons, and still more by their drunk- 
enness were endangering the life and character of 
the whole people. And yet the transportation com- 
panies, controlled by Americans, have year after 
year prevented reasonable restriction of immigra- 
tion because it would lessen their receipts. The 
people can stop all this by government ownership, 
or by giving legislators who sell out to railroads 
free passes to "Salt River." 

COMMERCIALISM. 

Commercialism as a national passion, which has 
been named as one of the causes of these clouds, is 
"peanut politicians" — many of them "peasant saloon- 
really but another name for that covetousness which 
Jesus Christ denounced more severely than any other 
sin, except hypocrisy, with which it is often asso- 
ciated. It can be mitigated by teaching the children 
in our homes and schools and churches that there 
is no honor in muddy or bloody gold, and that those 
who "get riches, but not by right," are to be pitied 
rather than envied as having sacrificed character for 
cash, as if a man had exchanged diamonds for 

COMMERCIALIZED POLITICS. 

As for the fifth cause, the control of politics by 
pebbles. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 73 

keepers" — much of the condemnation that has been 
heaped upon these for their bad politics should be 
put upon the strong and scholarly Americans who, 
for the love of money in some cases, for the love 
of ease and refinement in others, have neglected their 
duty as leaders in civic life. 

Some of the weakest men that have ever been 
seen in Congress have been sent as "representa- 
tives" of districts in which our leading universities 
are located. One of these was as perfect an embodi- 
ment of the "dude" as any sculptor could have mod- 
elled. He had been sent to Congress to represent 
a district which includes what has usually been re- 
garded as America's foremost university partly be- 
cause his wife had money and partly because no 
scholarly men in that district wanted the place. He 
finally died of paresis, typical of the condition of 
the "body politic" in his district. Another of our 
foremost universities has been represented by the 
stupidest man I have ever met anywhere in public 
life. I do not blame him, for he is probably 
doing the best he can, but rather the hundreds of 
strong scholarly men in that district who use their 
talents to amass money and write books and read 
them, when an intelligent patriotism would send 
them to the front in civic battle, in city, state and 
nation. 

SOULLESS CORPORATIONS. 

And now as to the sixth cause, the growth of 
"soulless corporations." The historian will find it 



74 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

hard to measure the subtle and far reaching effect 
upon national morals of the doctrine that came in 
with these corporations, that they can neither cheat 
nor be cheated. In a New York club, to which the 
writer formerly belonged, which gathered once a 
week at an early hour to discuss popular questions, 
especially economic problems, he never heard such 
prolonged laughter as was evoked by Mr. Packard, 
of the famous business college, apparently without 
intention, when he attempted to illustrate the im- 
portance of honesty in little things, and in so doing 
told of a talk he had given in one of his classes in 
regard to honesty in the use of postage stamps and 
the like, whereupon, at the close of the lesson, a 
young man had come to him with tears in his eyes 
to confess to withholding a nickel in a street car 
during the "rush hour" of the previous day. This 
story of a young man's sorrow at cheating a corpo- 
ration seemed to that audience, made up largely of 
corporation officers and lawyers, so inexpressibly 
funny that they laughed and laughed in recurring 
waves for several minutes. But under all of this 
there was to thoughtful men a tragic revelation of 
the demoralizing influence of the theory of "soulless 
corporations." Men who are accustomed to be 
honest only in dealing with individuals, and adopt a 
different code for corporations, in this age when cor- 
porations are very numerous will be likely to find 
their corporation code of morals stealing into their 
individual transactions. The remedy is in faithful 
teaching in home and school and church of that 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 75 

doctrine of the Bible which Milton expressed when 
he said that "nations (it is equally true of all asso- 
ciations) are moral persons/' Manifestly what 
would be wrong for an individual cannot be right 
for a group of individuals, however associated. 

A GOOD USE OF LUXURY. 

We shall not deal more wisely with public prob- 
lems until we turn the abundant leisure of this age 
of luxury to patriotic studies, instead of devoting it 
so largely to idleness and play. Luxury is not the 
peril of the rich alone. Every family in which all 
the adult members — men and women who are in 
health and out of school — are not bread-winners, is 
living in luxury. One boy boasted that his father 
had "a 'pizarro' on the side of his house, a 'port 
rico' in front, and 'copula' on top" ; to which another 
boy, not to be outdone, replied that he had heard his 
father say he "had a mortgage on his house." The 
mortgage on the house is not always a luxury, but 
the prevalence of "pizarros," which travelers on 
trains see occupied by idling adults in mid-after- 
noon all across the land, is in striking contrast to 
the previous generation, when only about one family 
in a town had such a luxury as a piazza, and even 
that family seldom used it, except for children, dur- 
ing business hours. Not many of our successful 
men grew up on piazzas, and America can hardly 
expect to escape the national decline luxury has al- 
ways brought since Rome fell amid cries for "bread 
and games," unless our increasing leisure is partly 



76 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

used to study and solve the serious problems of our 
time. Why may not the "new woman," sitting idly 
about in so many homes and hotels, show herself 
"new" indeed by studying for home protection the 
great questions of civics, which Mrs. Livermore tells 
young women are "as interesting as the everlasting 
novel." 

"Six days shalt thou labor" is a command binding 
upon all adults in health. If we do not need to work 
for money we are bound to work regularly, with the 
mind at least, for our own and others' good. 

SOME RELATIONS OF THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY. 

There is at least one theological cause of these 
clouds, namely, the doubts thrown by the words of 
some, and the silence of more, on the doctrine of 
future retribution. When "liberals" in orthodox 
churches were denying future punishment. Dr. 
Ryder, the Universalist, rebuked them, holding to 
future, though not endless retribution. Whenever 
men doubt a future hell they make hells on earth. 
When the oppressed cease to believe that God will 
in the future mete out justice to those who by cor- 
rupting government have escaped their deserts here, 
they seize the bomb and fire-brand and themselves 
make a judgment day. Not only for the salvation 
of individuals, but for social salvation also we 
must follow Christ in warning men of "a judg- 
ment to come." If the rich roue who seduces a 
guileless country girl, and, when she sues for re- 
dress, by a smart lawyer and bribed witnesses 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 77 

blackens her character and escapes, is not to face a 
supreme court of appeals in the future where he 
will get the justice he escaped here, it would make 
one doubt the very existence of a God. When the 
writer said this in a western Chautauqua, a frontier 
preacher exclaimed, "Thank God for hell." Yes, for 
without future punishment, justice, the crowning 
work of God, would be an unfinished task. Hell, 
rightly conceived, is the supreme court of the uni- 
verse. 

That characterization of the Stuart period by the 
keen censor who said the people had "taken the 'not' 
out of the commandments and put it in the creed," 
needs this qualification, that it is the change in the 
creed which comes first. 



78 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

VII. 
GROUNDS OF HOPE. 

And now what are our grounds of hope that the 
causes of these clouds will be removed and the 
clouds themselves will be dispelled? 

First, that great word, which, when Lincoln was 
shot and the nation's heart stood still with fear, was 
spoken by Garfield, standing by the statue of 
Washington in Wall street, New York, and which, 
when Garfield was shot, was again taken up as the 
nation's creed : "The Lord reigns." 

I am a Christian optimist. Not a wilful optimist, 
who finds hope by turning his back on the clouds; 
not a professional optimist, who acts as if retained 
to defend the present against all comers by explain- 
ing away facts; but a Christian optimist, who ex- 
pects right to win, chiefly because God reigns. 

"Clouds and darkness are round about him," but be- 
hind the clouds I see, not a "silver lining," but "the 
great white throne." "He shall not fail nor be 
discouraged till he hath set judgment in the earth." 

David, pursued by Saul, when in his forest hiding 
place he could see no visible encouragement, east 
or west, north or south, looked up through the trees 
to heaven and "encouraged himself in God." Why 
should we fear anything for ourselves or our coun- 
try with Him looking at us? 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 79 

A little girl, whose pet dog was barking lustily 
at the passing militia, called to her mother in great 
trepidation : "Oh mamma, come quick ! Gip's go- 
ing to bite the army!" As foolish are the fears of 
those who act as if the devil were about to devour 
God, who will win, but the sooner if we help him. 

There are visible encouragements also. When 
a woman on shipboard in a storm asked the captain, 
"Is there any danger?" he replied, "We must trust 
in God ;" at which she exclaimed, "Has it come to 
that?" It has not "come to that" in the sense she 
meant it. 

SPOTS OF BLUE BETWEEN THE CLOUDS. 

In the writer's own time, clouds as many and as 
dark as those described have been dispelled wholly 
or largely from the national sky, leaving spots of 
blue between the clouds not yet as large as the 
clouds, but large enough to show the way to the 
"clear shining after rain." What are these dozen 
spots of blue between the clouds, and how were 
they cleared? 

A century ago there were seven evils that even 
timid Christians said had "come to stay;" namely, 
the plague, piracy, duelling, slavery, polygamy, the 
lottery, race gambling and the spoils system. Sev- 
eral of them had behind them the same vast power 
of politics, money and social custom as the clouds 
we so much dread today. But they are gone or 
going, because God has "come to stay," and a fezv 
of His people have staying qualities. Three other 



80 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

reforms are so nearly complete that we may count 
them as at least assured : namely, the secret official 
ballot, scientific temperance education, and interna- 
tional peace. And the white man's traffic in liquors 
and opium in mission fields is on trial in the grand 
jury of the great Powers, charged with being hos- 
tile to markets and morals alike. 

How were these spots of blue cleared of clouds? 
By the same methods we may hope to scatter the 
clouds that remain. 

THE PLAGUE. 

It will surprise many to find such a physical evil 
as the plague listed with moral and social evils, but 
intelligent men are more and more coming to recog- 
nize that individual sickness is often a sin, and an 
epidemic is usually a social crime. It seems in- 
credible that our fathers should have tolerated the 
plague, counting it "a necessary evil," and even "a 
visitation of God," when it was so manifestly due to 
the social sin of unsanitary streets. As this ancient 
plague has been almost annihilated throughout the 
world by co-operative sanitation, so some day there 
will be co-operation of government and science and 
philanthropy, in removing moral cesspools from our 
streets in the interest of what the United States 
Supreme Court has declared to be the two supreme 
purposes of government, "the public health and the 
public morals." 

Here it is appropriate to quote the shallow ob- 
jection made to reform legislation, "You can't make 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 81 

men moral by law," for the manifest fact is that 
we can make men moral by-law, just as we make 
them healthy by law,* not by individual compul- 
sion, but by removing the occasions in the one case 
of vice as in the other case of disease, so making it 
harder to do wrong and easier to do right, just as 
we make it harder to be sick and easier to be well. 

PIRACY. 

Piracy is another evil, once common and no doubt 
thought by many a permanent curse in the world, 
that has been almost obliterated. And, curiously 
enough, it was in China, in whose rivers about all the 
pirates who survived into the twentieth century were 
at its beginning hiding from an incompetent govern- 
ment, that a foreign tobacco company was in 1910 
placarding the dead walls with posters as big and as 
numerous as those of a coming circus, by way of 
introducing "Pirate Cigarettes" (so labeled) which 
should be opposed, on commercial as well as moral 
grounds, as piracy was itself suppressed, chiefly 



*How much has been accomplished by organized effort 
toward the reduction of disease and how much remains to 
be done were shown by E. E. Rittenhouse, President of the 
Provident Savings Life Assurance Society, in his address 
at the Atlanta Conference, 1910, on the hookworm disease. 
The death-rate of tuberculosis has been reduced 49 per 
cent since 1880 and $8,000,000 is now spent annually to 
fight that disease. Yet 130,000 American people die from 
it every year. The death-rate for typhoid fever as the 
result of better sanitation has declined 44 per cent in the 
same period. Yet the disease still claims 22,000 victims 
annually. The diphtheria death-rate has been reduced 80 
per cent. Yet the disease causes 20,000 deaths a year. 



82 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

through the appeal of imperilled trades to the gov- 
ernment. China, with the largest population in the 
world, and so prospectively the largest market if 
it is properly guarded against impoverishment, is 
so poor that even the cost of a few cigarettes is 
enough to take thousands of families beyond the 
line of adequate sustenance. The real perils of the 
Orient are not "yellow perils," but the three "white 
perils," cigarettes, beer and opium — the first two 
seeking to capture the places made vacant by the 
progressing campaign of the Chinese against opium. 
It is not likely that cigarettes and beer can be ade- 
quately dealt with by the government at present, 
for China, unfortunately, is bound hand and foot 
by treaties with European governments to allow the 
sale of all three of the curses named. In every 
other nation the police powers would be ample for 
any action desired by the native government in such 
matters. International public opinion should ex- 
press itself and compel the revision of these pirati- 
cal treaties. 

DUELLING. 

The almost complete extinction of duelling in 
the United States is instructive, because it was 
probably due, more than to anything else, to one 
tragedy, the death of Alexander Hamilton, which 
showed to the whole country, as by flash-light, the 
wickedness and absurdity of a social custom by 
which a man so essential to the nation's welfare 
might be "called out" by a man of far less quality 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 83 

who felt aggrieved at some fancied wrong, and shot 
down in the prime of life. The pistol of Aaron 
Burr — no thanks to him — really shot down duelling 
itself. 

Some day, not far distant, it will be seen by the 
majority, as it is seen now by the most progressive 
thinkers, that the duelling of nations is really as 
absurd as this old custom of private war, and that 
the quarrels of nations, often built on imaginary 
wrongs, should also be settled in the courts — in this 
case by the court of the nations at The Hague. The 
war between Spain and the United States was 
particularly kindred to the duel, for bpain knew 
from the first that there was no hope of success 
against a nation so powerful, and simply stood up 
to be shot at by way of vindicating its "honor." The 
absurd charge that the Spanish Government was 
responsible for sinking the Maine should have been 
submitted to arbitration, which it was the business 
of our side to propose. That it was not, puts a blot 
on that page of American history, dimming the 
honor of the most unselfish war of modern times. 

SLAVERY. 

Analogies between the extinction of slavery in 
America and the suppression of other slaveries that 
remain, such as that of the drink traffic, have often 
been developed. Southern people should not be so 
sensitive as some of them are, at these comparisons, 
for the North was scarcely less guilty than the South 
for the continuance of slavery, and those who ran 



84 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

the mills of New England were almost as much 
under the tyranny of "King Cotton" as the planters 
of the South. One of my earliest memories is see- 
ing the richest member of my father's church, 
in Maine, take his hymn books and family and 
march out of the church because my father 
prayed for the slave. And another early memory 
is seeing the officers of my father's church stand 
in a row to form a gauntlet between my father and 
the polls, when he went there under their frowning 
eyes to vote for Fremont. But for such a father, 
the son would probably never have undertaken 
similar reforms. It is easier to make the excuse of 
sincerity for the men brought up in the South than 
for such men in the North, and they were not few, 
and many of them were inside the Church. 

More than in the case of any of the three preced- 
ing evils was the abolition of slavery due to an 
organized campaign of education — the use of lec- 
tures and literature on a large scale to inform and 
arouse public sentiment. It may be thought that 
there is a marked contrast between this reform and 
those now in progress, in that the anti-slavery con- 
flict came to blood at last. But as the battle with 
the saloon grows more desperate, and the vast prop- 
erties of distillers and brewers become more en- 
dangered, it is to be feared that the few assassina- 
tions that have already occurred will be multiplied. 
History leads us to expect that the most desperate 
fighting, and so the greatest call for courage and 
devotion, will come at the last. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 85 

MORMON POLYGAMY. 

When the Republican party was organized, its 
declared purpose was to cut out "the twin ulcers," 
slavery and Mormon polygamy.* The political 
leaders now show very little disposition to fulfill 
the second part of their pledge and programme. 

A reminiscence of the battle by which Brigham 
Roberts was driven back from the doors of Congress 
is apropos. The writer was making a campaign 
across the country in behalf of his exclusion, and 
spoke in Salt Lake City to a representative audience 
made up of Gentiles and monogamous Mormons. 
His theme was, "Living and Dying Nations." He 
showed how licentiousness had been the chief fac- 
tor in making France a "dying nation," with more 
deaths than births, following the discussion of which 
he asked the question, amid a solemn hush, "What 
is the matter with Turkey?" He answered: "The 
matter with Turkey is the same as the matter with 
France, only they call the vice in Turkey by a less 
malodorous name. But licentiousness will kill an 
individual or a nation just as surely if it is called 
marriage and religion." I proceeded to show the 
evil influence of polygamy — in Turkey. Just when 
the audience expected I would make an application 
direct to local condition, I ended my point, again 



*Dr. H. K. Carroll's annual census of the American 
churches for 1909 (Christian Advocate, Jan. 27, 1910), 
showed that the "Church of Latter Day Saints," commonly 
known as the Mormon Church, had increased to the extent 
of 281 preachers, 258 churches and 71,444 members in the 
16 years from 1890 to 1906. 



86 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

and again, in the same way, reiterating the degen- 
erating influence of "polygamy — in Turkey/' This 
proved to be much more effective than any attempt 
of an outsider to discuss the question in a local way, 
for it kept continually before the audience the fact 
that Utah was in the same social group with Turkey ; 
that it was indeed, Turkey in America; and no other 
reproach could have been more awakening, nor 
would any more specific argument have proved a 
stronger appeal for the exclusion of the polygamist 
from Congress. Perhaps along that same line of 
teaching — setting this evil on its international back- 
ground — we shall be most successful in arousing 
the people of Utah — Mormons as well as others — 
to the need of bringing the state into civilization. 

In the success of the effort to exclude Brigham 
Roberts from Congress a conclusive answer was 
given to the cowards in Congress and lazy church- 
men outside who are fond of saying that "petitions 
are useless." In that fight it was proved that even 
the petitions of women, if they are numerous 
enough, are nearly irresistible. Although other 
organizations on the right and left wings did noble 
service, it was the women's clubs of the United 
States and the Woman's Christian Temperance 
Union that formed the center of the victorious battle 
line. One congressman, who had been temporarily 
retired from his position several years before when 
the prices went up on the bargain counters on ac- 
count of the McKinley Tariff Bill, said to me: "I 
am going to vote for exclusion whether it is consti- 



NATIONAL PERILS AXD HOPES 87 

tutional or not, for I have once been McKinleyed 
by the women." 

The writer believes in woman suffrage, combined 
with other suffrage reforms, as in Dr. Joseph Cook's 
famous saying: "No sex, no shirks, no simpletons 
in suffrage." 

It must be frankly said that the petitions of 
women, even in larger force, with those of a multi- 
tude of men, were not effective in a later case that 
it would be useless to reopen. It looks as if the 
defense of the country, for some years, against this 
spreading octopus of the Rocky Mountains, that al- 
ready controls enough politics to make it a political 
as well as a moral peril, will depend chiefly on the 
multiplying of Christian schools and the vigorous 
promotion of home missions in that part of the land. 

LOTTERIES. 

The successful war against lotteries is one of the 
most encouraging chapters in the history of Ameri- 
can morals. In my boyhood the lottery seemed to 
be as permanent as any evil of today. The Louisi- 
ana Lottery had behind it great social, financial and 
political influences, not only in Louisiana, but in the 
nation — AYashington being only second to New 
Orleans as a gambling center. It is said that the 
daily drawings of that lottery brought the proprie- 
tors twenty-eight million dollars a year, mostly from 
Louisiana and the neighboring states, while the 
''capital drawings" were capital crimes that drew 
money in golden streams from all parts of the coun- 



88 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

try. It was even more surprising that the cham- 
bers of commerce should tolerate this than that the 
churches made no effective resistance for many 
vears. 

Let those who think that Congress can be bought 
and sold take note that when the hour had come 
that merchants and moralists demanded the sup- 
pression of the lottery, it could not command money 
enough, with all its millions, to buy of Congress 
another year's lease of life. It is also very instruct- 
ive to note that when Louisiana could no longer 
draw money from other states, and must rob its 
own citizens only, the merchants of that state 
speedily suppressed it altogether. This recalls the 
word of Warren Hastings in regard to opium in 
India, that it was a "vile drug, suitable only for pur- 
poses of foreign exportation." The lottery was a 
vile institution, to be tolerated only when it could 
be used to draw large importations of money from 
other states. 

It is surprising how quickly sentiment changed 
when the agitation was fairly on. I visited the city 
of New Orleans in a southern tour for the promo- 
tion of Sabbath observance, in 1889, and having in- 
cidentally referred, in an address to the union 
preachers' meeting, to the fact that Louisiana had 
two blots on her fair name, first the presence of a 
legalized lottery, and second the absence of a legal- 
ized Sabbath, I was surprised at the end of my ad- 
dress, in which I had made no further reference to 
the lottery but had confined myself to the Sabbath 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 89 

question, to find that all else had been forgotten and 
that the most prominent men in the preachers' meet- 
ing were ready to attack me as a champion of the 
Sabbath for meddling with an outside question be- 
cause of that brief preliminary reference to licensed 
gambling. 

One of the most eminent preachers in that city 
said that "if there was any honest gambling, it was 
that of the Louisiana Lottery." But the very man 
who was foremost in rebuke and the chief apologist 
for the lottery that day, when the battle for its 
extinction was well started, was so ardent in his 
attack upon it that he was accused of inciting the 
people to suppress the lottery by violence, and no 
man had a larger influence in its final overthrow. 

In the adjoining state of Arkansas, at the table of 
a congressman and church warden, a few years 
before the fall of the Louisiana lottery, I referred 
to it in unfriendly terms, whereupon the wife ex- 
claimed in surprise: "We all patronize the lottery. 
My husband, who is a banker — he was absent that 
day — thinks that people should not gamble unless 
they can do it with their own money." That was 
about the extent of the anti-gambling sentiment, 
even in the churches thereabouts at that time. But 
it is very encouraging for those of us who have 
other battles to fight, to recall how, in spite of 
mighty financial, social and political influences back 
of the lottery, it was quickly overthrown. It was 
driven first from the mails, through a letter the 
writer sent from New Orleans, at the time above 



90 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

mentioned, to the Postmaster General, who turned it 
over to the Attorney General, who on that sugges- 
tion drafted the law. 

Afterward, chiefly by the individual efforts of 
Prof. J. R. Woodbridge, of Boston, the lottery 
was driven from the express companies, into which 
it had retreated as into a second breastwork. Since 
then lotteries have become in the United States 'al- 
most an extinct species of vice. They appear rare- 
ly except in fairs of old world churches among us, 
and occasionally for a night or two in some charity 
fair that seeks to get money for the poor by 
encouraging the vice which is one of the chief roots 
of poverty. 

I recall a suggestive incident in the battle against 
the lottery in one of the Dakotas, where, by some 
trick, a bill establishing a state lottery was carried 
through one house of the legislature. This fact 
being published the next morning through the As- 
sociated Press, I turned to my files instantly and 
brought together anti-lottery arguments of Attorney 
General Miller and other timely matter and made a 
broadside of about the size of a daily newspaper 
page, and before the close of that day in which the 
news reached us, had mailed these arguments to 
hundreds of preachers in that state by way of help- 
ing them to defeat the plot, which they did. 

How much this swift reinforcement had to do 
with the victory will probably never be known in 
this world. But the story suggests that there ought 
to be in some national office, and in some office in 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 91 

every state, a supply of such ammunition on many 
subjects, not only in the files ready to be printed, 
but in printed sheets ready to be sent out, for re- 
formers should not forget Napoleon's words, "I 
know the value of minutes in war." 

RACE GAMBLING. 

This brings us to race gambling as another cloud 
that is being rapidly dispelled. Traveling through 
Ohio, I read in the Cincinnati Enquirer, that 
a bill to legalize a horse racing association had been 
introduced in the Ohio Legislature. A telegram 
blank was at once drawn, like a handy pistol, and 
sent off at the next station, ordering race gambling 
documents, that we keep by thousands for such 
emergencies, sent to the preachers and moral 
leaders at Columbus. I afterwards learned that 
within an hour after I had first read the news, the 
literature had been put in the mails at Washington, 
and within twenty-four hours it was in the hands 
of Columbus leaders, who thanked me for the timely 
help it brought for their swift and successful fight. 

Since 1896, I have fought the race gambling 
monopoly almost constantly, first in the District of 
Columbia, then in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, 
Virginia, Ohio, Maryland, and most of all, in New 
York, where the International Reform Bureau made 
a three years' campaign around the enemy's strong- 
hold, which Governor Hughes, in the third year, 
carried to success. Among the "scenes and un- 
seens" of these anti-gambling campaigns, into which 



92 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

I have put more effort than into any other battles 
except those against alcohol and opium, there are 
some incidents which may prove instructive to 
younger men by showing the tricks of the enemy 
and the best methods to defeat them. Some of 
these incidents show the necessity for swift action, 
especially when racing with race horses, and with 
equally swift manipulators of legislatures, for it is 
the usual plan of these race gamblers in attempting 
to secure a gambling monopoly in a state legislature, 
to keep everything out of sight until the last three 
or four days, and then rush their bill through be- 
fore the slow-moving forces of goodness are aware 
that anything is being done. Occasionally they find 
one as swift on the other side. It was on a Friday 
afternoon that I read in a Washington paper that 
"a bill to establish a racing commission" had been 
favorably reported by District of Columbia Com- 
mittees in both Houses of Congress. It was ex- 
pected to pass on "District Day," the following 
Monday. There was little further news in the 
item, except a statement that there would be "no 
open betting." The word "open" opened the re- 
former's eyes, and opened the battle. The bill was 
found to be, as suspected, a bill less intended to 
"improve the breed of horses" than to depress the 
breed of men for money. The two District Com- 
mittees of Congress had both reported this bill 
without reading it, on the assurance of men inter- 
ested that there was "no gambling in it." But the 
reformer found that the bill was nothing more or 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 93 

less than a bill to combine gambling, hypocrisy and 
monopoly. Pretending to forbid all gambling, it 
forbade all gambling outside of one race track, and 
thus gave a gambling monopoly to the rich, while 
continuing the heavy punishments then in force for 
any one who should gamble anywhere else. An in- 
tended trip to Pittsburg for that night was post- 
poned, and duplicate letters sent to the District Com- 
mittees of Congress, assuring them that they had 
been misinformed, and that the bill provided for 
licensed gambling. On the strength of this letter, 
the House Committee withdrew the bill for hear- 
ings, and the Senate Committee, without withdraw- 
ing the bill, allowed hearings. The contest became 
a thirty days' war, in which the tide of battle ebbed 
and flowed. Under our attack, the promoters of 
the bill introduced twenty-nine amendments, mak- 
ing the prohibition of every form of gambling com- 
plete, but removing the five years' imprisonment 
penalty of the existing law to substitute only the 
nominal penalty that money won by race gambling 
might be recovered by civil suit if the loser were 
mean enough, after entering into such a scheme, to 
sue for recovery — a penalty which was no penalty 
at all, and which was so ambiguously expressed that 
some good senators and congressmen supposed that 
it was not a substitute for the existing prison pen- 
alty but an additional punishment. Even the at- 
torney for the District seemed to be deceived by 
the language, and approved the bill a second time 
during the contest, leading the Commissioners to 



94 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

approve it. But after a preacher had been sent to 
this attorney to show the trick, he attempted, too 
late, to withdraw his approval. The bill, with the 
Commissioners' endorsement, had gone to Congress. 
It was just then, in a hearing of the Senate Com- 
mittee that the attorney of the race gambling monop- 
oly asked the reformer who led the other side if 
he were a lawyer, hoping to discredit his attack on 
the bill because he did not belong to that profession. 
But the reformer answered instantly and confidently 
that the only good law that had been brought to 
bear upon the case had come from the preachers — 
the lawyers in Congress having been deceived by 
the tricky phraseology, and the attorney of the 
District having given an opinion which he sought 
to withdraw after receiving a half hour's instruc- 
tion in law from a preacher. Whereat the laugh 
was on the lawyers, and the cross-questioning 
ceased. 

In the same hearing a famous detective sat at 
the Senate Committee table, who had been hired 
by the gambling monopoly to canvass the reformer's 
record as a pastor and reformer in New York and 
Brooklyn, hoping to find something by which to 
drive him off the case. The detective had con- 
fessed to an acquaintance on the train, not suppos- 
ing it would get to the reformer, that he had been 
unsuccessful. Turning to the detective in the hear- 
ing:, the reformer said to the Committee: "These 
gamblers having no valid arguments, have been 
trying to win this case by putting a detective on my 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPE^S 95 

past history, who has come back to his clients here 
empty handed." At which he was speechless. Suf- 
fice it to say that in spite of the approval of the 
Commissioners and of both Committees of Congress 
— that of the House Committee being reiterated a 
second time — the bill was defeated, illustrating the 
fact, often demonstrated, that there is small chance 
for a bad bill to succeed if there is a determined 
opposition, and the attention of the country is fully 
drawn to the measure. Many a man who will 
quietly vote for such a measure if there is no op- 
position wishes it pigeon-holed when it becomes a 
subject on which he may be called to account. 

The experiences of this battle of Washington 
were of great service when, several years later, a 
similar fight had to be made in the Pennsylvania 
legislature, where again the three day trick was 
tried. A racing bill was introduced on Thursday. 
There was a head line statement that there was no 
gambling in it, in the only Philadelphia paper that 
gave the long bill in full, which probably not a 
Christian in the state but only the gamblers read 
through. They expected that the bill would go 
through without any opposition on the following 
Monday or Tuesday, the farmers having been 
bought off by certain promises for racing at country 
fairs, and no religious or moral forces having shown 
■ up for a fight. 

The trick was discovered by the writer in a lec- 
ture trip which took him into the state that day. He 
read the whole bill and on turning to the gamblers' 



96 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

New York paper, found editorial congratulation that 
the second richest state in the country was about to 
be captured without opposition — not a finger being 
lifted in all the state to oppose the bill. 

Such is the imperfect organization of our moral 
forces that it was "nobody's business" particularly, 
but "everybody's business" to look after such mat- 
ters. It might have been expected that the State 
Young Men's Christian Association or the State 
Federation of Churches, or one of the denom- 
inational synods or conferences would have taken 
up the matter. But none of them felt any respon- 
sibility for state reforms and they were all ignorant 
of the devices of this subtle foe ; and so a reformer 
from outside, exhausted physically and financially 
from a hard winter's campaign in Congress, had 
to spring into the fight, and use five hundred dollars 
of his own money, and all the forces of an interna- 
tional office at Washington turned on this state fight 
by telegraph, to arouse the state to its danger. 

The first night, providentially, the lecture audience 
was aroused to such a degree that their representa- 
tive in the state legislature, a party leader, was 
induced to take the decisive part that somebody must 
take in the legislature to defeat the plot. The next 
morning eight dollars' worth of telegrams were sent 
in a single hour, including copy to the printer at 
York, for an appeal to the moral leaders of the 
state; orders to the office at Washington to write 
envelopes to Pennsylvania preachers and bankers — 
all of these jobs to meet the reformer at Harris- 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 97 

burg on Monday morning, which they did, and in 
five days the state was informed of the plot, al- 
though only the North American in Philadelphia 
and few papers elsewhere would tell even the news 
of the case. 

Suffice it to say that after seventeen days of fast 
and furious fighting, the richest gambling syndicate 
the world had ever known, in league with the might- 
iest political organization ever yet developed any- 
where, was defeated in a united plot to legalize 
a race gambling monopoly in that state. 

An important warning from this fight is against 
the slowness with which Christian forces act at such 
a time. The only organization in the state that 
sent a deputation to aid the lone reformer from out- 
side was a Quaker meeting in Philadelphia. When 
the most important hearing before a committee of 
the legislature was held, the reformer had but one 
associate from the state that in moral earnestness 
is second to none. And yet, even in the state where 
the people were then supposed to have less power in 
politics than in any other, a very inadequate dem- 
onstration of opposition conclusively defeated this 
gambling plot — one of many proofs that moral 
forces can win whenever they half try. 

As I have frankly shown that in some things our 
own country has the worst record in the world, it is 
fair to say that in gambling, Australia outruns any 
land I have seen. Reliable citizens of Adelaide told 
us the main street was so blocked a few days before 
our arrival, with gamblers madly investing their 
money in gambling at little shops on either side and 



98 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

in near by alleys that the mounted police had to 
clear the way for the street cars. Anti-gambling 
measures were then pending and we hope there is a 
better story to tell today. 

THE SPOILS SYSTEM. 

The "spoils system," at the close of the Civil War, 
seemed to be as fixed a cloud in our sky as any that 
now remain, and indeed there is still some mist in 
that spot. But the contrast between the civil serv- 
ice at the end of President Andrew Jackson's term, 
when there were practically no office holders ex- 
cept Democrats, and at the end of the second term 
of President Grover Cleveland, the only Democratic 
president since the war, who left more Republicans 
than Democrats in office though he had controlled 
appointments eight years out of the previous twelve, 
is one of the most encouraging contrasts in the whole 
history of reform effort. Moral reformers who take 
a narrow personal view of vice and virtue scarcely 
think of the spoils system as a serious wrong, or of 
civil service reform as an important social virtue. 
But we have only to conceive of the spoils system 
as applied to private business to see how dishonest it 
is. No one would ask to be employed in a private 
business except on the ground that he was qualified 
to do the work. But even Christian men seriously 
urge at this late day that men shall be appointed to 
public office because of service to party, as if a gov- 
ernment that belongs to all the people might properly 
be used as a party committee for promoting party 
ends. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 99 

This is a part of the corrupting corporation moral- 
ity to which we have already referred, the widely 
prevalent idea that principles of right and wrong, 
generally recognized in individual transactions, are 
to be set aside when either party to a transaction is 
an association, whether governmental or commer- 
cial, only that in case of governmental associations 
the cheating goes beyond anything that would be 
attempted in commercial life, in the effort to secure 
support for men incapable of rendering an honest 
equivalent in service. 

THE PURCHASING OF VOTES. 

Another of the clouds that has been largely dis- 
pelled, as compared with the past, though here again 
is a lingering mistiness, is the purchasing of votes. 
Very common more recently than the Civil War, 
it became so bold and disgraceful that in four 
short years ballot reform swept almost the entire 
country, bringing in the Australian ballot, which 
made it very difficult for any one who purchased 
votes to be sure that the goods had been de- 
livered. For that reason and because of a quick- 
ened public sentiment the vote buying industry has 
greatly decreased. This bribing of voters will not 
be wholly suppressed until in addition to the secret 
ballot, publicity of campaign contributions is fully 
secured. 

SCIENTIFIC TEMPERANCE EDUCATION. 

One of the reforms that so far as government 
action is concerned has been fully accomplished, is 



100 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

the introduction of scientific temperance education 
in the public schools. This has cleared away a cloud 
of previous neglect in this matter and has revealed 
"the star of hope of temperance reform over the 
school house." This movement was began by Mrs. 
Mary H. Hunt in behalf of the Woman's Christian 
Temperance Union in 1882, when Vermont 
pa'ssed the first state law to make scientific 
temperance education compulsory. By 1900 all 
states had similar laws, and Congress had ex- 
tended this law to the District of Columbia and the 
territories and to our military and naval academies. 
There is some mistiness yet at this spot in the sky, 
for while the enactment of laws is completed, the 
enforcement of the laws has been neglected in many 
states. The presence of a brewer's child in the 
school, or the influence of a brewer upon the super- 
intendent of schools or the president of the board 
of education has, in many cases, made the teaching 
of these lessons half-hearted or merely nominal. 

What is needed is a corps of scientific lecturers 
who shall bring scholarship and enthusiasm to this 
form of teaching and present it with slides, charts 
and other illustrations and experiments, in all the 
schools in rotation. In Great Britain, sixty scien- 
tific lecturers are employed by the Band of Hope 
Union to help the teachers in this work. It should 
be possible in the United States, with laws requiring 
temperance education on all our statute books, to 
secure efficient administration of this law through 
such lecturers without taxing private benevolence. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 101 

THE WAR CLOUD. 

We can hardly claim that the war cloud has en- 
tirely disappeared from our sky, for 67 per cent 
of all our vast revenues in the year ending June 30, 
1909, were spent for past and future wars. It is 
surprising that the abuse of charity in undeserved 
pensions has been treated so timidly by charity re- 
formers, doubtless in the fear of being thought to 
be ungenerous and unpatriotic. But pensioners 
themselves, who would keep the pension roll a roll 
of honor, should oppose every pension proposed for 
which there is no just warrant. Every honorable 
pensioner should fight especially the numerous cases 
of young widows of old soldiers who married them 
in their last days in order to live on the govern- 
ment for the remainder of their lives as soldiers' 
widows. Some of them have secretly remarried but 
maintain their status of widowhood in sworn docu- 
ments in order to continue the government support 
for the new husband. At least one Pension Com- 
missioner was hounded from office for opposing 
such robbers of the government. 

The other chief drain on the national treasury for 
militarism is the ever mounting appropriation for 
a "big navy." An equal expenditure in peace 
propaganda would make unnecessary our own and 
other navies, built chiefly from the hard-earned 
money of the poor. 



102 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

THE ANTI-OPIUM REFORM WAVE. 

And now we come to a clearing spot in the sky 
which represents the most encouraging of all recent 
reform activities. I refer to the tremendous strides 
of anti-opium reform in China and in the field of 
international politics. Progress in this reform has 
been much faster than in the temperance reform, 
suggesting that other old evils of our time may be 
brought to a sudden end. 

In the opening month of 1906 opium smoking fin 
which 125,000,000 out of the 400,000,000 people of 
China were participating, according to a government 
decree) seemed to be as permanently entrenched in 
that country as an evil habit, maintained by greed 
on one side and appetite on the other, as is the 
liquor traffic today in the other parts of the world. 
The Anti-Opium Society of Great Britain had 
waged a thirty years' war in behalf of the release 
of China from British treaties written in blood, that 
made the opium traffic compulsory. That society 
accomplished nothing visible except to secure an 
empty declaration of Parliament that "the Indo- 
Chinese opium trade is morally indefensible" — and 
financially indispensable, might have been added, for 
no mandate or even request was given to the gov- 
ernment to do anything to abate the traffic. The 
thirty years of persistent agitation, however, had 
not been without effect, and public sentiment was 
crystalizing towards some result. Particular ef- 
fort had been made in the election of the Parlia- 
ment of 1906 to secure men who stood right on 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 103 

local option and the opium question, with the result 
that the new House of Commons was more like 
Cromwell's Parliament than any that had met in the 
intervening years. The thirtieth of May was set as 
the day to vote on this Indo-Chinese opium trade. 
The International Reform Bureau had been con- 
ducting national and international agitation against 
both liquors and opium as hindrances to missions, 
from 1900 forward, and was called on to be a 
Blucher to bring in foreign reinforcements for the 
Waterloo of opium that was expected on the date 
named. Resolutions had been secured from mission- 
ary societies and chambers of commerce asking 
President Roosevelt to use his "good offices" with 
the British Government to secure the release of 
China from the opium treaties, and give the nation a 
free hand in these police matters such as is exercised 
by all other independent nations. Copies of these 
resolutions were sent to members of Parliament, and 
also copies of right action that had been taken by 
the United States Government looking towards the 
suppression of the opium traffic except for medicinal 
uses in the Philippines. In that connection an hon- 
est and valuable report on the status of the opium 
trade in the Orient had been officially made and 
published. 

The action of New Zealand, Australia and South 
Africa in the banishment of opium was also in- 
fluential, but nothing was quoted with such mani- 
fest effectiveness in the parliamentary debate as 
the Philippine report. That a kindred nation had 



104 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

resisted the financial temptations involved and 
adopted a policy of prohibition was a fact that 
strongly appealed to Parliament. Behind the scenes 
President Roosevelt interposed his. good offices, as 
requested, and secured the co-operation in this of 
another friendly power, the Japanese Government. 
With all this re-enforcement the anti-opium forces 
of Great Britain were able to carry through unani- 
mously a resolution which not only condemned the 
British opium traffic but requested the government 
to bring it to a "speedy close." Before the vote 
Rt. Hon. John Morley, Secretary of State for India, 
had supported the resolution in behalf of the gov- 
ernment. This vote was received by telegraph 
in China with great popular demonstrations of ap- 
proval, and was supposed to be an emancipation 
proclamation that would set China free of the black 
treaty bonds that were upon her. The Chinese Gov- 
ernment ordered the closing of opium dens in six 
months and a rapid decrease in poppy cultivation. 
Native "Opium Discarding Societies" were soon en- 
rolling millions of the people — burning costly opium 
pipes in great bonfires in the streets. A "wave" of 
anti-opium reform, impelled by almost unanimous 
public sentiment of people and officials, swept 
through the land, and has continued for years with- 
out abatement, notwithstanding it was soon found 
that the British government was not ready to with- 
draw the opium treaties, and opium restrictions were 
continually checked by the fact that while the 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 105 

Chinese were restrained, the British opium dealers 
could not be controlled. 

To encourage and help China in this difficult posi- 
tion, as well as to aid opium suppression in the 
Philippines, President Roosevelt called a dozen na- 
tions to co-operate at Shanghai in 1909 in a Joint 
Opium Commission, which was in reality a jury of 
twelve nations with the British Government on trial, 
and at the same time a member of the jury. Some 
strong utterances were made by this Commission, 
but the desire of the United States government to 
have it internationally declared that opium should 
be used only as a medicine was defeated by the 
British commissioners. 

However, the matter was taken up again by Pres- 
ident Taft, who called an international conference, 
with larger powers, to meet at The Hague, 
with the avowed aim not alone to help China 
but to secure an agreement among the nations 
to suppress everywhere throughout the world 
the sale of opium except for medicinal pur- 
poses. That the reform should have reached a point 
where such a great step forward could be seriously 
considered in a conference of nations indicates the 
most amazing progress that was ever made in a 
battle against a popular evil in so short a time. If 
the friends of missions the world over and the in- 
telligent leaders of international commerce do not 
miss their opportunity, The Hague Conference will 
succeed in its great purpose, and if successful we 
may reasonably hope that soon after there will be 



106 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

a right answer to the similar question of liquors in 
Africa, which President Roosevelt submitted (with- 
out result as yet) to the British Government and 
also to the Brussels Conference of Nations, in 1906. 

THE THIRTEENTH CLEARING SPOT. 

Off against the thirteenth cloud we have named 
is the whitening prohibition map of the United 
States, which proclaims that 40,000,000 out of the 
90,000,000 of our people have outlawed the saloon. 

I have in earlier pages cautioned my comrades 
against exaggerating the significance of this "re- 
form wave," lest it should become a wave of poppy 
juice, for our audiences need, above all things, to 
be awakened to action, and for that purpose no 
alarm rings louder than the fact that up to 1907, at 
least, the decrease of saloons had not been 
sufficient to cause a per capita decrease in the 
whole country in the consumption of liquors, 
partly, as I have indicated, because increased wages 
and increased hours of opening saloons have led 
those who drink to drink more partly because im- 
migration brings a host of new drinkers every year ; 
and partly because temperance people have neg- 
lected to follow the campaign for "No license" with 
a personal pledge-signing crusade for "No liquors." 

Notwithstanding these qualifications, next to the 
marvellous progress of anti-opium reform, the 
progress of the prohibition movement is the most 
encouraging of reform successes. At the Twelfth 
International Congress on Alcoholism in London in 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 107 

1909, the hopes of reformers in all lands reached 
the high tide of enthusiasm when by our whitening 
map it was shown that the nation which has been 
for a hundred years the experiment station of the 
world in liquor legislation and which has thoroughly 
tried every method of restriction — low license, high 
license, government ownership, "disinterested man- 
agement," even "doxology" saloons — has, after a 
century of experimentation, knowing well, as a trav- 
eling people, the imperfections of prohibition, settled 
down to the fact that it is the best legal restraint of 
the liquor traffic. The only statistics needed to prove 
this to a thoughtful man anywhere in the world are 
the statistics of prohibition's rapidly increasing areas 
in the country where the temperance experiments 
have been the most thorough. If further statistics 
are needed, they are at hand in the vast expenditures 
recently made by alarmed liquor dealers to defeat 
prohibition, which they always fight much harder 
than any of its substitutes. And surely we ought to 
count that man as beyond the pale of reasoning who 
believes that such a class of men as the liquor dealers 
would expend vast sums in frantic anti-prohibition 
literature, in addition to high license fees, if they 
really could "sell more liquor under prohibition" 
without license fees or literature funds, as they have 
made some pious people believe. It will be observed 
that the author uses the word "prohibition" for local 
as well as larger suppression of liquor selling. It is 
an ignorant prejudice that makes some men applaud 
"No license" and condemn "prohibition." Prohi- 



108 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

bition means "No license" on a state-wide scale and 
"No license" is simply local prohibition. But local 
prohibition, by some belittled, has conquered in 
many states an area as large or larger than the state 
of Maine. Prohibition never forbids drinking any- 
where but only the sale in a certain area to decrease 
the temptations to drink, always allowing importa- 
tion of liquors bought elsewhere for private con- 
sumption. 

I have spoken of evils in which our national rec- 
ord is the worst of any country in the world, but 

ON THE WHOLE OUR MORAL STATUS IS THE BEST, 

for our wide-spread prohibition and separation of 
church and state are points of incomparable supe- 
riority to any of the first class nations with which 
ours is associated in the front rank of Great Powers. 
These two excellencies more than off-set all the sec- 
ondary matters in which we fall short. Even Can- 
ada lags behind in the primal political virtue of 
prohibition. And Great Britain is yet more behind, 
not alone because its women stand on both sides of 
the bar and because gambling is fostered by nobility 
and royalty, but most of all because the union of 
church and state makes much of religious life a 
form, and some of it a farce, and puts most serious 
social and financial and political disadvantage in the 
path of all denominations save the one favored by 
the state, which, in other ways, by its political sub- 
ordination, is hurt most of all. But here again it is 
"profitable for instruction in righteousness" to recall 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 109 

that in nine aspects of temperance we are excelled 
by other nations. 

NINE POINTS IN WHICH OTHER NATIONS EXCEL US. 

Great Britain excels us in temperance insurance; 
in temperance hotels ; in pledging the children ; in 
lodges and other weekly group meetings for tem- 
perance discussion ; in the active participation of 
public officials and labor leaders in temperance prop- 
aganda. Germany excels us in experimentation on 
alcohol by university professors and doctors. 
France excels us in making known the harmfulness 
of even moderate use of beer and wine through 
posters put up by order of city governments. Japan 
excels us and all lands in effective prohibition of the 
sale and use of opium save for proper medicinal 
uses — a standard which President Roosevelt set be- 
fore the nations of the world at Shanghai in Feb- 
ruary, 1909, and which President Taft has urged 
again upon an anti-opium conference of nations at 
The Hague, which the Laymen's Missionary Move- 
ment of all lands should carry to success. 

TEMPERANCE INSURANCE. 

It is amazing that American abstainers, entitled 
by statistical science, based on sixty years of British 
classified insurance, to 26 1 /? per cent higher rebates 
than the most moderate drinkers, have been so long 
content to waive this dividend. American insurance 
companies ought to be required by abstaining pa- 
trons to adopt the double plan of mutual insurance 



110 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

by which those very moderate drinkers who are en- 
titled to insurance at all will be put in a separate 
class from abstainers, each class receiving the re- 
bate it has actually earned. In the light of modern 
science life abstainers should be divided also from 
those who have formerly poisoned their cells with 
alcohol even though now reformed. As a specific 
example of what temperance insurance means, let 
me say that the writer, during a visit to England in 
1909, thinking it would be interesting to make a test 
of the physical status and outlook of a reformer wh d 
had been working fourteen hours a day for fifteen 
years without a whole day off, secured a $5,000 in- 
surance policy and got 25 per cent at the start for 
being an abstainer and found his expectancy of life 
was twice that of the most moderate drinker. Being 
unwilling to stop talking even at death, this insur- 
ance was devoted to temperance literature as the 
mustard seed of a reform literature fund, to be 
handled by a moral and social commission for many 
reform organizations and for the great cause of 
moral reform at large. 

TEMPERANCE HOTELS. 

That American temperance men should give so 
little attention to the important matter of temper- 
ance hotels is also surprising to our British friends 
who have these hotels — many of them of high grade 
— in almost every city of Great Britain and Aus- 
tralia. It is no small protection to the great army 
of travelling men to provide for them comfortable 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 111 

hotels without a bar. This matter should have the 
thoughtful attention of wealthy temperance men in 
the United States, who might in such hotels com- 
bine business and philanthropy. In England where 
abstainers are a much smaller percentage of the 
population, some of these hotels pay as much as 
thirteen per cent. At one in which the writer 
stopped in London in 1909 it was necessary to en- 
gage rooms days in advance, and the ducal land- 
lord had just increased the rent $25,000 a year and 
required $40,000 to be put into the hotel in repairs, 
[n Australia the temperance caterers call their 
hotels, that tower far above the bar rooms beside 
them, "coffee palaces." All of this is a good 
answer to the shallow talk in commercial circles that 
"a hotel can not be made a success without a bar." 
The President of the American Hotel Association, 
in an article in the Sunday School Times in 1909 
exposed this fallacy by citing many successful tem- 
perance hotels in the United States, where, however, 
they are rare and many of them of a quality that 
dishonors rather than helps the cause. 

JUVENILE TEMPERANCE ORGANIZATIONS. 

It is equally surprising that we should be so much 
outdone by the British in pledged organizations of 
children. If we had done as well as the British in 
proportion to our population we should have eight 
millions of enrolled children in our Loyal Temper- 
ance Legions and other juvenile temperance so- 
cieties, which are scarcely a skirmish line compared 



112 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

with the great army of the juvenile temperance 
bands of hope abroad. The general neglect of 
pledge-signing for a score of years past is doubt- 
less one of the chief reasons why the per capita con- 
sumption of liquors continues to rise in spite of our 
extending prohibition. 

LODGES AS SALOON SUBSTITUTES. 

Europe excels us in lodges, especially Sweden, 
where there are thirty-three Good Templars in Par- 
liament. And it is largely due to the strength of the 
Good Templars that Sweden is the foremost nation 
in Europe in temperance reform. We are depend- 
ing too much upon occasional public meetings, los- 
ing the great benefit that comes from small group 
meetings every week or two to talk over temperance 
matters. The nation is very far behind its own 
past record in this matter, for in 1855 there were 
five millions of pledged abstainers enrolled in tem- 
perance organizations that held regular local meet- 
ings. Where the saloons have been closed, lodges 
are needed more than anywhere else, to provide a 
new social centre. 

PUBLIC OFFICIALS AT TEMPERANCE MEETINGS. 

There are few contrasts more striking between 
the reform meetings of Great Britain and those of 
this country than the fact that in the former case 
the presiding officer is nearly always a public official. 
The writer in his various tours through the British 
Isles has usually had as chairman at his meetings 
for the promotion of anti-opium and anti-alcohol 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 113 

crusades, some member of Parliament or the Lord 
Mayor or some other high official. They do not 
seem to know of the usual excuse of American 
officials, that one who is to act on the temperance 
question legislatively or judicially must not enter 
into public agitation lest he should seem to lose his 
impartiality. Men do not make such excuses when 
the battle is on tariff or tuberculosis. As abroad, 
our public officials ought to be willing to preside at 
a meeting for social betterment even when they do 
not expect to agree with everything said by the 
speakers. 

The backwardness of American officials in re- 
forms is not likely to be lessened by the fate of 
seventeen "dry statesmen," whose scalps the Presi- 
dent of the Illinois Liquor Dealers' Protective Asso- 
ciation held up in its annual meeting for 1909 as 
defeated candidates for high positions in the No- 
vember election of 1908, following which also, as 
the prohibition press tells us, twenty state legisla- 
tures defeated temperance bills, most of which were 
only moderately restrictive.* In this connection we 



*The Prohibition Press, of Chicago, in reviewing the 
year 1909, said : "Despite the evidently increasing senti- 
ment of the people in favor of Prohibition, the liquor 
politicians and party machines friendly to the traffic, by the 
enactment of a weak and colorless amendment, still pre- 
vented the passage of protective interstate legislation by 
Congress, and defeated the will of the people as regards 
Prohibition and other long demanded measures in more 
than twenty states, including Arkansas, California, Dela-. 
ware, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New 
York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, 
Wisconsin and the District of Columbia." 



114 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

may well note also, by way of calling back to the 
battle line those who have stopped fighting to shout 
over a few victories, that Dr. Samuel Zane Batten 
has shown how the alarmed and aroused liquor 
dealers have enlisted against prohibition five millions 
of voters in what they call the "allied trades," by 
convincing the glass blowers, for example, that if 
the saloons are not allowed to go on "smashing 
things" there will soon be nothing to blow but the 
prohibitionists. They have also persuaded the 
coopers that if beer saloons are closed, there will be 
little call for barrels, as if there would not be more 
oil barrels needed to light up the darkened homes of 
the drunkards, and more flour barrels to feed their 
famished families. It was high comedy when the 
Central Labor Union of Boston, responding to the 
frantic cry for help of the frightened liquor dealers, 
voted a protest to Congress against enacting prohi- 
bition for the District of Columbia. Mr. Chas. 
Stelzle, of the Presbyterian Home Mission Board's 
Department of Labor, did a great service in 
stemming this liquor tide among the labor unions 
by rallying intelligent labor leaders at the American 
Federation of Labor Convention of 1909, in To- 
ronto, to the defense of labor's true interests, which 
are those of abstinence and prohibition, since even 
moderate drinking, as has been shown, reduces both 
physical and mental efficiency. 

BRITISH LABOR LEADERS LEAD MORAL REFORMS. 

American labor leaders should be reminded that 
this whole labor group in the British Parliament is 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 115 

ready to stand, inside and outside, for any movement 
in behalf of good morals, and is scarcely less 
prominent in that regard than in its own special 
reform, which, intelligently considered, is very 
largely dependent upon the promotion of good 
morals for its full success. 

Germany's pre-eminence in experimentation 
on alcohol. 

There are seventy physicians enrolled in the 
American Society for the Study of Alcohol and 
other Narcotics, and there has been much good work 
done by them and other Americans in showing the 
true nature and effects of alcohol; but German uni- 
versities and German physicians and chemists are 
entitled to first honors in such studies. Professor 
Forel, one of the eminent continental experimenters, 
having visited the universities of the United States, 
reported that he "found crass ignorance" among our 
professors in regard to the recent experiments on 
alcohol. 

MUNICIPAL POSTERS ON ALCOHOLISM. 

We are decidedly behind France also in making 
these discoveries known through posters put up by 
order of city governments, by which it may be made 
impossible for any one who can read to be ignorant 
of the perils that linger in the use of any alcoholic 
beverages. 



116 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

THE MOST PERFECT PROHIBITION. 

Japan excels us in the effective prohibition of the 
sale of opium. Japan, unexcelled in medical 
science, finds about two thousand pounds of opium 
a year sufficient for all legitimate medicinal uses in 
a nation half as large as ours, which means that four 
thousand pounds is sufficient for us, whereas we 
have used annually, in recent years, more than four 
hundred thousand pounds, much of it in patent 
medicines, where it is more dangerous because hid- 
den and disguised. We hear almost daily of the 
smuggling of opium into the Philippines, whose 
officials plead the impossibility of suppressing the 
traffic, because of the "extended coast," whereas 
Japan, with the same sort of coast, but with a more 
energetic set of officials, makes an absolute success 
of opium prohibition. 

These points in which other nations excel us are 
all of them points in which our reform work should 
be improved and strengthened, but there are several 
other improvements imperatively needed in order to 
accomplish a more adequate reduction of saloons and 
especially of liquor consumption and other kindred 
evils. 

Reform societies themselves need to be reformed 
today, first and most of all by the development of 
some 

PLAN OF CORDIAL CO-OPERATION. 

Habitual cordiality is quite as important as co-opera- 
tion. Reformers are engaged on one of the hardest 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 117 

and most unpopular tasks in the world, and ought 
to be good comrades. When the writer was be- 
ginning his work as a reform specialist, a presiding 
officer in Indianapolis said: "You are starting out 
to reform men, to change them; and they don't want 
to be reformed. t You have undertaken a hard job." 
The stonecutter finds no will to resist his own in the 
stone he is shaping, but there is both the individual 
will and the social will to be reckoned with in chang- 
ing the man and changing his surroundings for 
moral ends. 

The reformer has his own human nature to deal 
with, as well as that of others. In all ages it has 
been natural for men to be critical of competitors. 
We are not surprised to find a merchant who can 
say nothing good of another in the same business 
who is winning a race with him in the competition 
of trade. Even a tradesman should conquer this 
propensity for the sake of his own manhood, and 
frankly rejoice, like a good sportsman fairly beaten, 
when in the race of business another has fairly out- 
run him. But in the realm of religion and reform 
especially, this propensity to criticize competitors 
should be severely repressed — indeed displaced by 
brotherly love. Mr. Moody, catching himself one 
day in a petty criticism of another evangelist, said 
intensely, half to his own soul, "I would cut my 
hand off before I would do that." 

Probably there is no sin to which all strong char- 
acters are more prone than to unforgivingness to- 
ward some one, person for some real or fancied 



118 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

wrong, and as often as otherwise the one person 
who is regarded as guilty of this unpardonable sin 
is a relative or comrade. Christ "knew what is in 
man" so well that he left no room for doubt as to 
what must be done in such cases. "If thy brother 
sin against thee, go and tell him his fault between 
him and thee alone. If he hear thee, thou hast gained 
thy brother." "If thou bring thy gift to the altar 
and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught 
against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, 
first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and 
offer thy gift." The writer has had his quarrels 
with comrades, but in the light of mature years be- 
lieves they were not worth while. He would as soon 
keep an ash barrel in his parlor as a grudge in his 
heart. 

Let us frankly and calmly discuss different policies 
— the old question of conservative and radical meth- 
ods — but let us allow no personal or social jealousies 
in the thin skirmish line of reformers. 

One way to increase cordiality is for every officer 
of a reform society to resist the temptations to claim 
too much credit for his own society for reforms ac- 
complished, and to withhold from faithful allies 
their just mead of praise. One reformer who is 
very scrupulous about this, having one day omitted 
to name his allies because the choir had eaten far 
into his time and compelled abridgement, was "called 
down" for such omission by a business man in the 
audience — a good precedent for other hearers by 
way of reforming the reformers. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 119 

It is not Scotchmen alone who say humorous 
things unbeknown to themselves. A pamphlet has 
been published on the temperance outlook through- 
out the world, which gives a fairly accurate story of 
a great temperance "wave" that has swept through 
the United States, bringing state prohibition to a 
large portion of the South, and local prohibition to 
great sections of the North; but in naming the 
agencies by which this great civic revival has been 
produced neither the Anti-Saloon League nor the 
Woman's Christian Temperance Union is once men- 
tioned. I will leave it for a national prize puzzle, 
to start the country guessing, to what one society 
this great revival is attributed — the society of course 
to which the writer of that pamphlet belongs ! It is 
to "laugh and learn," for the fault is not unknown 
in other societies. There are some in almost every 
reform organization who are ungenerous enough to 
ignore their allies in telling of victories, and this 
"horrible example" of the absurdity of such a course 
may well arouse every reformer to ask the question : 
In telling of results accomplished, do I habitually 
recognize all the other organizations that have faith- 
fully co-operated with my own in the victories over 
which we rejoice? 

TEMPERANCE FORCES TOO SCATTERED. 

Here comes in the value of co-operation, for dif- 
ferences among good men disappear, and apprecia- 
tion is increased by direct co-operation, shoulder to 
shoulder. Direct efforts for this needed national co- 



120 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

operation began in earnest at the Temperance Cen- 
tennial in 1908, when the various temperance so- 
cieties gathered in Saratoga to celebrate the first 
American temperance society, which, it was claimed, 
had been organized in Moreau, a little village near 
by, in 1808. That was but one of many local springs 
of the modern "temperance movement." 

There was encouragement in the contrast between 
the beginning and the end of that first temperance 
century, for in the first years there were only a few 
scattered local societies, while at the end there were 
several strong national organizations, with state and 
local branches. But these national organizations 
were as independent of each other at the end of the 
century as the local organizations had been at the 
beginning. 

The national federation of liquor dealers was not 
yet matched by any form of national co-operation 
among its foes. It was characteristic of that Tem- 
perance Centennial that the various temperance 
organizations met separately in different churches 
and halls, though the delegates were not sufficiently 
numerous to have filled any one of the places if they 
had all met together. There were some sessions in- 
tended to be joint meetings, but they were small and 
far from representative, for each organization was 
chiefly interested in its own meeting. The only 
meeting in which there was any considerable union 
of forces was one made over by the writer's giving 
up his opportunity to speak in the best hour of the 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 121 

best day of the convention in order to bring several 
great societies together. 

The need of greater co-operation was so apparent 
that in one of the general conferences in which all 
international societies were supposed to be repre- 
sented, a resolution was adopted that the various 
national temperance societies should arrange to 
hold their annual meetings at times and places 
so near each other that there would be oppor- 
tunity for the leaders to hold an annual council of 
war. Another resolution declared for a United 
Temperance Press, to realize which a committee was 
named on which were officers of seven national and 
international organizations. The various societies 
proved to be unprepared for such united action and 
the committee was never called together. 

Meantime the need of such action became more 
and more apparent, especially at national and state 
capitals, and the mover of that resolution persisted 
in his efforts to realize co-operation. A "harmony 
dinner" was held in Washington early in 1909, at 
which half a dozen societies were represented by one 
or more officers each, and the good effects were at 
once seen in friendlier co-operation. A larger 
banquet was therefore suggested. 

A little girl who attempted to sing "We'll all swell 
the harmony," being more familiar with another 
word, sang "We'll all smell the hominy." Reformers 
should remember that from the beginning smelling 
the hominy and swelling the harmony have gone 
together. Few need such harmony banquets more 



122 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

than strenuous reformers, whose combativeness is 
largely developed and not infrequently is turned 
upon comrades who may be a little less conservative 
or a little less radical than themselves, or whose zeal 
for some one reform or some one society may start 
a conflict. In inviting the reform leaders of the 
country to another "Reformers' Conclave" at the 
national capital in December, reference was made to 
this occasional misdirection of the combativeness of 
reformers as being analogous to the case of a man 
who bought a boning machine that was intended to 
separate fish from the bones, putting the bones on 
the plate and the meat into the mouth, but having 
turned the machine the wrong way his mouth was 
swiftly filled with bones, with very uncomfortable 
results. 

In response to the invitations for the "Conclave," 
delegates and officials came from twenty-one na- 
tional and international organizations, whose point 
of unity was that all were in favor of total absti- 
nence and the total suppression of the saloon, .and it 
was found that in these two fundamental principles 
of unity, organizations as far apart as the conserva- 
tive Anti-Saloon League on the one hand, and the 
radical Prohibition National Committee on the 
other, were able to consult together in perfect har- 
mony for a week. 

Evidence that there was need of putting this unity 
of spirit into some permanent expression that would 
lead to permanent unity of action was forthcoming 
the very first day, in the eloquent picture given by 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 123 

Congressman Richmond Pearson Hobson, of Ala- 
bama, of the defeat of constitutional prohibition 
which had occurred shortly before in that state. On 
the one hand were the united national forces of the 
liquor traffic, while on the other were only the local 
temperance forces, inexperienced in political war- 
fare, and scantily equipped with literature and 
speakers and funds for so great a fight. He scored 
the temperance leaders of the nation for lack of 
generalship. It was shown that there should be 
some national body ready to throw into such a fight 
lecturers and literature far beyond what the local 
forces could pay for, since a temperance fight is 
not really a local one, but simply part of a world- 
wide war. As well suppose Gettysburg should have 
defended itself as regard any temperance fight as 
less than a national battle. Reform statesmanship 
should see that battle plans are made long in ad- 
vance, as Bismarck and Von Moltke prepared for 
the war with France. 

The president of the Woman's Christian Temper- 
ance Union of Kentucky drew a similar picture of 
the many defeats of county option in 1909 in that 
state, due again to the fact that only the local forces 
were engaged on the temperance side, while the 
whole national force of the liquor traffic was avail- 
able on the other side, so far as it might be needed 
to carry the day. 

While reformers should fight against war as one 
of the great evils of the day, they should study the 
generalship of the greatest warriors to guide them 



124 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

in moral warfare. And the very pinnacle of mod- 
ern generalship is seen in the story that was told 
me by Marquis Ito in an interview at Seoul in 1907. 
I had completed the task of reform diplomacy for 
which I interviewed him, bringing to his attention 
tactfully and without offense the fact that under 
Japanese administration both gambling and the 
opium traffic were increasing in Korea. Then I 
turned for a moment of enjoyment to ask a ques- 
tion that had been upon my mind, whether Marshal 
Oyama, Secretary of War and Commander in Chief 
in the Japanese war against Russia, was a profes- 
sional soldier or only a civilian, like many of our 
Secretaries of War, taking up the supervision of 
military affairs as a political duty. Fortunately 
Marquis Ito misunderstood my question and 
answered : "The commander in chief does not go to 
the firing line. He sits among the telephones. Mar- 
shal Oyama at Mukden had sixty-eight telephones 
connecting sixty-eight different commanders with 
his headquarters ; and when one commander was 
hard pressed he quickly transferred troops from 
some other commander who had more than enough." 

The picture was that of a commander in chief 
sitting upon a hill overlooking the battle, with his 
back to a rock and under an overhanging tree, with 
an extemporized telephone "central," moving troops 
as if the battle field were but a chess board. It 
seems too clear for argument that there ought to 
be some joint commission that could as skillfully 
move lecturers and literature lying idle at one point 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 125 

to some other where the battle was on. At the very 
time when Alabama was defeated for lack of such 
re-enforcement there were at least one hundred re- 
form lecturers of real ability who were lying idle or 
speaking not more than one-sixth as many times as 
they would have been glad to speak. And there 
were great stores of temperance literature lying idle 
upon shelves because societies could not afford the 
postage to send them out. And there were half used 
office rooms of reform societies where, without any 
increased expense for heat, light, furniture or super- 
vision, a hundred additional clerks might have been 
added to send prohibition arguments to pastors and 
leaders. And there was at that time enough money 
and time being wasted by reform speakers in long 
railroad trips between scattered and occasional ap- 
pointments to have saved the day if the money had 
been devoted to sending those same men to what was 
at that time the "firing line" of the national war be- 
tween the home and the saloon. 

Congressman Hobson, fresh from that field of 
needless defeat, charged the temperance leaders of 
the nation with lack of generalship. Are we guilty 

or not guilty ? 

It is answered that it was a foolish fight ! Then it 
adds yet another argument for a commission of 
temperance generals, to which the inexperienced 
local forces might have turned for advice as to the 
best form of constitutional amendment and the best 
time and way to make such a fight. 



126 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

The later defeats, of state prohibition in Virginia 
and of local option in Maryland, underscore all that 
has been said of Alabama. 

Such a union commission is needed also to send 
out petition forms and other promotion literature to 
pastors especially in behalf of legislative bills, state 
and national, which several organizations have en- 
dorsed, for which no one society therefore can be 
expected to supply all the funds and labor. In the 
absence of such a plan only 80 petitions came in 
three months for the three most prominent moral 
measures pending in Congress in the winter of 
1909-10. 

And the commission would have a still larger 
task than any of those that have been described, in 
the steady work of developing union lecture courses, 
to be followed by the distribution of reform litera- 
ture from door to door — the first to plow, the sec- 
ond to sow the public mind with facts, with a view 
to harvesting total abstinence practice as well as 
prohibition sentiment. The "Reformers' Conclave" 
voted to submit to the various national and inter- 
national organizations devoted wholly or partly to 
temperance reform the proposal to co-operate 
through an officially-appointed Joint Temperance 
Commission; but because of the fact that official 
meetings having power to act are scattered all 
through the year, and because some leaders do not 
yet see the need and value of co-operation, and for 
other reasons, it was found inexpedient to wait for 
the slow development of an official commission. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 127 

Accordingly, an organization that so fully recog- 
nized the need of such a union agency that it was 
ready to put valuable property in its hands by way 
of starting an endowment fund for the distribution 
of reform literature through all reform societies in 
the interest of the common cause, named an Inter- 
national Moral and Social Commission that will 
stand on its merits as unofficially representative of 
the reform forces in many lands and make its ap- 
peal for moral and material co-operation to those 
who believe that the present wasteful and divisive 
plans of reformers should give way to cordial and 
systematic co-operation.* 



Those who have accepted a position on "The Inter- 
national Moral and Social Commission" up to the date 
when this book went to press were : Prof. John M. 
Barker, Boston ; Rev. Samuel Zane Batten, D. D., Lincoln, 
Neb. ; Hon. Henry W. Blair and Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts, 
Washington, D. C. ; Hon. R. P. Hobson, M. C, Greens- 
boro, Ala. ; Rev. Sylvanus Stall, D. D., Philadelphia ; Mr. 
Henry S. Warner, Chicago ; Rev. J. G. Shearer, D. D., 
Rev. S. D. Chown, D. D., Toronto ; Archdeacon Boyce, 
Sydney, Australia ; Dr. R. Hercod, Lansanne, Switzerland ; 
Rev. E. W. Thwing, Tietsien, China. The first task of the 
Commission will be to secure funds to put the new dis- 
coveries as to alcohol into schools in books, and into mil- 
lions of homes in leaflets. 



128 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

VIII. 

VICTORIES OF AN ARMY OF ONE. 

We need as much as increased organization in this 
country, increased recognition of what Daniel 
Webster said was the greatest thought that ever 
passed through his mind, that of his "individual re- 
sponsibility to God." History is full of illustrations 
of the power of the individual. It is made up 
largely of the victories of an army of one. In this 
day, when organization has been carried to an ex- 
tent never known before, there is real danger that 
we shall get to depending too much on paper con- 
stitutions. In my seminary days in Boston, when 
it was the best part of my education to hear Wen- 
dell Phillips about once a month on an average for 
three years, I remember that he said on one occa- 
sion, referring to this danger of depending too 
much upon organization and neglecting our indi- 
vidual opportunities, that the time would probably 
come when a mother "could not spank her own 
children without a constitution and by-laws." Years 
afterwards, speaking to the Mother's Congress of 
New York State, I recalled this remark and inti- 
mated that the time which the preacher prophesied 
had come; but I said, "If the great orator thought 
that the proper administration of discipline to 
children was not a subject that called for associated 
council, he was surely mistaken." Nevertheless, 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 129 

there was a wholesome warning in his quaint utter- 
ance, for surely in all our churches and associations 
scores of people run to waste because they are de- 
pending upon some committee to do such things as 
every man should do as the opportunity offers. 
Organization is beneficial only when it preserves in- 
dividual responsibility and activity, and multiplies 
it by association, in accordance with the divine 
arithmetic, that "one shall chase a thousand, but 
two shall put," not two thousand but "ten thousand 
to flight." In other words, organization at its best 
multiplies individual power fivefold. But organiza- 
tion in many instances is not at its best, and simply 
displaces a larger and nobler individual activity. 

The twenty-one years I have devoted wholly to 
reform work abound in encouraging illustrations of 
the large results that may be achieved by individual 
action. Indeed, the greatest surprise that has come 
to me in reform activity has been the discovery 
again and again and again that wrong doers will 
cease their wrong doing in many lines if some one 
will courteously ask them. The only arrest that 
most wrong-doers need is what Miss Frances E. 
Willard named "the arrest of thought." What this 
means in connection with individual effort can best 
be explained by a group of representative incidents, 
gathered out of more than five hundred of the same 
sort in the same life. 

Arriving in a New Jersey city of about ten 
thousand inhabitants one Saturday evening at five 
o'clock, and noting that there was a whole hour 



130 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

before supper — enough to accomplish some per- 
manent local reform if one knows how — I said to 
the driver of the carriage that was to take me to the 
home of a prominent citizen, "Drive me to the 
nearest news room." There I found a courteous old 
gentleman, connected, as was afterwards learned, 
with one of the churches, who, notwithstanding, had 
on his shelves several periodicals such as were al- 
lowed on none of the railway lines and were mani- 
festly under the ban of the law, a fact which neither 
the dealer, the preachers of the town, nor the patrons 
of the place seemed to know. The newsdealer's at- 
tention was called to the character of these period- 
icals and to the law of the state, whereupon, with 
manifest innocence, he declared that he had no idea 
there was anything improper or illegal about them. 
He was simply selling what the news agency had 
sent, apparently never noting the psychological effect 
of these periodicals upon boys in their age of adoles- 
cence who came to his store to buy them. He at 
once promised to send them back and sell no more. 
It had taken less than five minutes to accomplish 
this, and the driver was told to go to the next news 
room. This was kept by a lady and her daughter, 
and when the latter, on inquiry, handed to the re- 
former one of the foul periodicals, he said to the 
mother, "Do you see what sort of a magazine your 
daughter is offering to a gentleman?" The mother 
colored to the roots of her hair, and said that she 
had felt that such literature ought not to be sold, 
but knew nothing of the law, and had handled them 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 131 

simply because the news agency had sent them. 
She, too, was glad to promise not to sell them any 
more. The third newsdealer was visited with sim- 
ilar results. In ten minutes' time, a city of ten 
thousand inhabitants had been rid of a stream of 
moral pollution pouring weekly and monthly into 
its shops and homes. A year afterwards the re- 
former found that these newsdealers had kept their 
word, but a fourth newsdealer had opened. He 
waited half an hour outside his shop in order to see 
him alone, and in five minutes he was ready to join 
the others in excluding such literature from his 
place. 

Journeying on a lecture tour through Pennsyl- 
vania, I found that there would be an hour between 
trains at a junction and again recognized that there 
was time for some local reform. In that hour I se- 
cured the promise of four newsdealers to discon- 
tinue the selling of certain criminal and vicious 
periodicals and libraries. I notified the pastors 
of these promises and asked them to follow up this 
advantage. If they did not "hold the fort" after it 
was so captured, it was certainly their own fault. 
Having lectured one night in a city of Michigan, 
I found on starting for the train the next day with 
my host, a Y. M. C. A. secretary, that there were 
at least five minutes to spare in getting to the sta- 
tion. I remarked that there was "time enough to 
clean a news room," and entering a high-class book 
store, found some of these corrupting periodicals 
there, secured the promise of their banishment, and 



132 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

reached my train on time. A similar incident oc- 
curred in a city in Pennsylvania. Arriving five 
minutes ahead of the train at the depot, I said again, 
"There is time to clean a news room," and going to 
one near the station, kept by a good natured Nor- 
wegian who was probably uninformed about our 
laws, I pointed out the periodicals that were illegal 
and unwholesome, secured their removal, and 
caught my train. 

Arriving in a city of West Virginia one Saturday 
night about half past nine, somewhat wearied, I 
thought myself excusable for not taking my usual 
Saturday night recreation, which is cleaning the 
news rooms of whatever town I am to serve by 
addresses on the following day. I had partly dis- 
robed when the power of habit arrested me, and 
feeling that I should lack a quiet conscience if I 
omitted my usual Saturday evening exercise, T went 
out upon the street, visited four newsdealers, se- 
cured the promise of each of them that they would 
cast out this class of literature "if the others would," 
which required a second tour, and at eleven o'clock 
the double oromise had been obtained from them 
all. On returning a year afterwards, I was told that 
the promise had been faithfully kept. 

In none of these cases was there an unpleasant 
word. Individuals were always approached with 
the watchword in mind that "Evil is wrought for 
want of thought." Dealing with offenders alone 
and on this assumption, in a quiet spirit, success was 
usually achieved without any appeal to force. In- 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 133 

deed, in a hundred such cases, not half a dozen re- 
fusals have been encountered. 

One Saturday night in a city on the Hudson, I 
visited seven newsdealers then operating there and 
secured the promise of six of them to stop selling 
literature that glorified crime and made lust at- 
tractive. But the seventh man, when talked with 
quietly in the back of the shop, began to bluster, 
and refused to accede to my reasonable request. It 
being then too late to see the chief of police, he 
was seen on Sunday morning, at which time the 
news room was again open. The chief promised 
that he would himself take care of the obstreperous 
offender. Such an appeal to the authorities is sel- 
dom necessary, and in this class of cases is usually 
effective whenever made. 

I had a similar experience in regard to foul 
pictures in windows. In an Ohio town I saw in a 
saloon window a picture that would corrupt the 
imagination of passing youth, which had been there 
so long that it was marked with fly spots. Ap- 
proaching the dealer courteously and reminding him 
that such a picture was unwholesome and illegal, 
he consented to remove it, and twenty minutes 
later, when I passed that way to lecture, it had dis- 
appeared. 

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to suggest 
that reformers are depending too much on saving 
the world by talking. Both speakers and hearers 
need to combine precept and practice. 



134 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

GOOD HUNTING IN PITTSBURG AND CLEVELAND. 

During a week's stay in Pittsburg, being some- 
what wearied, I decided on some recreation, and so, 
purchasing a hunting suit, I visited fifty-one news- 
dealers, secured from every one of them the prom- 
ise to cease selling vicious and criminal periodicals 
by simply showing the law, which I carried on a 
card in my pistol pocket, and drew whenever it was 
necessary. This experience was subsequently writ- 
ten up under the heading, "Hunting in the Wilds of 
Pittsburg," by way of showing younger reformers 
how easy it is, if one goes at it in the right spirit, 
to remove without prosecution and by individual 
effort, many of the moral perils of the streets. 

Another representative case occurred when ap- 
pointments for three Sundays in Cleveland held 
me there over the two intervening weeks. Reason- 
ing that the Anti-Saloon League was looking after 
the temperance matters and the Sunday Union after 
the Sabbath breaking, but that no organization was 
doing anything to speak of to remove temptations 
to impurity in literature, pictures and shows, I took 
that up as a convenient task for so brief a period. 
General Nelson A. Miles had recommended shortly 
before that automobiles should be used in war, and 
I said, "I will be the first to use one." Securing 
the promise of an automobile from a Bible class 
teacher, I made a copy of the drastic law of Ohio,' 
that had seldom been enforced, forbidding any ex- 
posure where a boy could see it of foul pictures or 
literature, under the maximum penalty of five hun- 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 135 

dred dollars fine or two years imprisonment. I 
asked the city attorney to sign a copy of the law as 
correct, and to state that it was "published for those 
who had broken it unwittingly." The city attorney 
readily consented to print copies of the law for me 
and an additional supply for the Endeavor Societies 
that might follow up my work, and for the police 
that they might give a copy to every person in the 
city dealing in pictures or literature. With this cer- 
tified law as my only weapon, and accompanied by 
the Bible class teacher, whose automobile had been 
granted for the campaign, and by one of the secre- 
taries of the Y. M. C. A., twenty newsdealers were 
quietly "raided" in two hours and a half. Foul 
pictures were torn up without protest in ten of them, 
and in all twenty corrupt magazines were dumped in 
a heap and a promise was secured that they should 
be sent back to the news agency and never handled 
again. Not a rough word was spoken on either 
side. The whole excursion was as exhilarating 
as an elephant hunt in India or a hippopotamus 
hunt in Africa. We of the reforming party could 
scarcely keep back the laughter as we saw the terror 
which the reading of the law created in those who 
had been violating it, and who were very glad to 
escape with a promise to sell no more of the for- 
bidden literature. The trip was an admirable illus- 
tration of Dr. Parkhurst's revised version : "The 
wicked flee when no man pursueth, but they make 
better time when some one is after them." 



136 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

After the automobile had been dismissed, I made 
an additional call alone at a tobacco shop where a 
foul picture was the center of a decorated window. 
Having shown the proprietor the law, and the risk 
he was running by such an exhibition, he was glad 
to have me tear the picture up instead of taking it 
away as evidence, and said, with an attempt to be 
cheerful, "I thank you, Reverend, I thank you kind- 
ly; my daughter's a member of the Christian En- 
deavor." As some men are attempting to go to 
heaven clinging to the skirts of their Christian 
wives, this man was hoping to escape the law by 
hiding behind his religious daughter. 

Only one newsdealer in Cleveland refused to re- 
move the corrupting literature pointed out, and 
this was a young man, whose father, the senior 
partner, was absent. On the reformer's reporting 
his conduct to the chief of police, the latter went at 
once to his place, and on the reformer's next visit 
the youth was meekness itself, and made no more 
trouble. 

MORAL STREET CLEANING. 

A similar policy has been pursued in a more im- 
portant reform, indeed one that ranks next in im- 
portance to the temperance reform in these days, 
the cleaning of foul shows, which are probably do- 
ing even more harm than saloons in proportion to 
their number, because they reach the very children 
in the penny peep shows, the nickelodeons and mat- 
inees, most of which have in them some appeal to 
passion or some glorification of crime. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 137 

In the frequent discussion of trusts the worst two 
are too much overlooked, the race gambling 
trust, that does its deadly work largely with young 
men, and the still worse theatre trust that corrupts 
even the children. 

In a Nebraska city, having spoken in the high 
school in the afternoon, as I delight to do, I went 
out upon the street to make a diagnosis of the town 
before giving a curative prescription in the evening 
lecture. I found a lot of school children coming 
out of a nickelodeon. The expression on their faces 
suggested that they had seen something they were 
ashamed of. This led me to investigate, and I 
found, as usual — in combination with some innocent 
amusement, one bad piece — in this case, "A Re- 
turn to Hell." There were women in hell, and they 
did not wear white ribbons, or much of anything 
else. The reformer was glad to see some of the 
school girls rise and go out in protest. He himself 
carried his protest to the mayor direct, who, on this 
word of a passing stranger, promised that the ob- 
jectionable portion of the exhibition should be re- 
moved before the evening performance, and, true 
to his pledge, he knocked hell out of that show. 
If that were done in many of our popular shows 
there would be little left. The reformer had occa- 
sion to tell this story soon after to a small audience 
in the Old Stone Church in Cleveland. Two young 
men came to the speaker at the close and said, "We 
liked that address, especially knocking hell out of 
that show." It will be observed that this is a plain, 



138 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

straightforward, historical statement, for the re- 
former never indulges in slang, but he is glad to 
come in this way occasionally on a much-needed im- 
precatory psalm. 

There are hundreds more of these illustrations of 
the possibilities of individual effort, but I close this 
group with an instructive incident of a swift victory 
over bad shows in Buffalo, N. Y. 

EVERYBODY CAN DO GOOD BY TIMELY LETTERS. 

Completing a tour of four continents, the super- 
intendent of the International Reform Bureau 
found that American cities in 1907 were generally 
making some progress in municipal reform; that 
Sunday saloons were generally closed throughout 
the West, and gambling was to a considerable de- 
gree suppressed; but in most instances Sunday 
shows, especially nickelodeons, were allowed to run 
full blast. Almost the only Western states in which 
the Sunday shows were found to be suppressed 
were Idaho, where a Reform Bureau law had ac- 
complished this result, and Missouri, where Govern- 
or Folk's influence had led to general law enforce- 
ment. Buffalo was found to be in an unusually good 
condition, its foremost merchant, Mr. J. N. Adam, 
having retired from business to become an energetic 
and progressive mayor. He had closed the Sunday 
saloons and Sunday shows and had suppressed 
gambling within the city limits all the week. But no 
one had asked him to reform the theatres in their 
week day exhibitions of crime and vice. The 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 139 

nickelodeons and penny arcades and bill boards 
were also representing criminals as heroes and im- 
purity as "gaiety." Accordingly the reformer ap- 
pealed to a men's league at the close of the Sunday 
morning services at the Plymouth Methodist Church 
to take up this neglected part of municipal reform 
as a fitting task for Christian men. He reminded 
them that in savage tribes the women are required 
to do the hard work, but the men do the fighting, 
while in our Christian nation the women are ex- 
pected to do both the work and the fighting. The 
development of men's leagues in the churches 
was mentioned as the most hopeful forward move- 
ment in the religious world, but it was urged that 
these leagues would not long continue unless manly 
work was given them to do. No church organiza- 
tion as such should go into partisan politics or law 
and order work, said the speaker, but it should fol- 
low prophets and apostles in reasoning with gov- 
ernment, of righteousness and temperance and a 
judgment to come. The immediate application of 
this principle was that these men should write to 
the mayor thanking him for the important reforms 
he had accomplished and urging him to clean up 
theatres, moving pictures, penny arcades and the 
billboards. Thirty men raised their hands as a 
pledge to write such a letter. Twenty-five kept their 
promises that very Sunday afternoon, in harmony 
with the message of the risen Christ to John on 
Patmos on the Lord's Day, when he said in a voice 
like the sound of many waters, "Write." He wrote 



140 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

seven letters, by way of positive observance of the 
Lord's Day. These letters, among other things, 
taught that Christians should hate what God hates, 
and should serve God in social ethics as well as in 
worship. The next morning the superintendent 
presented the same matter to the preachers' meeting, 
and at noon went with forty preachers to see the 
mayor. But the laymen's letters had already ac- 
complished the desired result. The mayor on open- 
ing his morning mail and reading those twenty-five 
letters of appeal from Christian business men had 
dictated a letter to the chief of police ordering the 
purging of the theatres, nickelodeons, penny arcades 
and bill boards, which was begun in the most radical 
way on Monday afternoon in a matinee from which 
three scenes were cut out. Nine pictures of seduc- 
tion were removed from one penny arcade that very 
night, and new bill posters had to be printed by 
one of the theatres. 

The incident is suggestive in many ways. Every 
man should vote his fraction of public sentiment in 
the mail box on city and state and national issues. 
Every one of the increasing millions of church mem- 
bers in this country should send at least seven letters 
that might well be written on next Sunday, if not 
before: one of them to the mayor, asking him for 
law enforcement; two to state assemblyman and 
senator, in behalf of needed state legislation ; 
another to the writer's congressman and two to his 
national senators, leaving a seventh to be written to 
some civic organization to give moral and material 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 141 

support to organized movements for a Christianized 
community. 

The illustrations that every one can make the 
world better by a letter are almost countless. The 
writer saw, for instance, in one of the most popular 
Saturday evening papers in our country, an adver- 
tisement of a twenty-dollar book, giving "the back- 
stairs gossip" of the French court in the days of the 
Louis'. There was no mistaking the purpose of the 
advertisement ; it was to make money by corrupting 
homes of wealth. The writer took the trouble to get 
the offered prospectus, found the book was what it 
purported to be, and wrote a courteous statement to 
that effect to the publishers of the paper, with the 
result that a letter of thanks was received and an 
assurance that, despite hundreds of dollars of ad- 
vertising profit involved, the advertisement would 
be at once discontinued. In a more recent instance, 
a paper came to the writer's notice, purporting to 
represent officially the Supreme Court of the District 
of Columbia and yet containing two whiskey adver- 
tisements. This was brought to the attention of the 
presiding judge in a courteous letter, with the result 
that the matter was taken up by the full court, and it 
was found that the paper had no authority for claim- 
ing to be such an official organ, and was compelled to 
cancel that claim in its pages. Many such letters are 
responsible, no doubt, for the fact that a long list of 
papers and magazines have decided to exclude liquor 
advertisements. Those that still continue to send in- 
to happy homes invitations to drink would hasten to 



142 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

discontinue these advertisements if parents who dis- 
approve them would serve notice that either the 
periodicals must go from their homes or the liquor 
advertisements must go from their pages. 

LOBBYING BY LETTERS. 

One of the most important uses of letters is to 
carry good measures and defeat bad measures in 
legislative bodies, local, state and national. Not one 
of a dozen important bills in .Congress that "make 
it harder to do wrong and easier to do right," would 
fail of passage if one million of the twenty-five 
millions of church members were practical enough 
in their Christian life to vote their fraction of public 
sentiment in brief courteous letters to their own 
congressmen and senators. A typical incident in 
this line occurred during the battle for the Sunday 
closing of the World's Fair at Chicago. One effort 
to open the gates on Sunday had failed, and the 
forces of greed were thoroughly aroused for a sec- 
ond effort. To make defeat swift and sure in this 
second battle it was desirable to kill the bill in the 
committee. The record of its eleven members on 
the previous vote was looked up. It was found that 
six men had voted for Sunday closing, four for 
Sunday opening, and one man did not vote — a man 
from the Essex district of Massachusetts. It was 
thus apparent that if he were with the minority, we 
were in a dangerous position with only one majority. 
In such case a very earnest effort would be made to 
influence one or two men's votes by hook or crook, 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 143 

and turn the scale. The first thing, therefore, was to 
find how this Massachusetts member was intending 
to vote in this new battle. He was called out of the 
House of Representatives into the lobby, and was 
met with this statement : ''When the Sunday closing 
bill for the World's Fair was up at the last session 
you did not vote." At this discovery that his record 
had been looked up, he raised his eyes, and then 
the question followed swiftly: "How are you going 
to vote this time?" Usually, in such a case, a con- 
gressman mounts the fence and balances himself 
like a trapeze performer crossing Niagara on a rope, 
careful not to lean to either side, but he answered 
frankly and boldly: "I intend to vote for Sunday 
opening." To this the reformer replied, "I know 
Massachusetts, and I know your district, for I for- 
merly lived there, and if you vote^that way, you will 
not represent either of them." To this he retorted, 
"I am the best judge of that," and turned on his heel 
and went into the House. The reformer said to 
himself, "I wonder if he would be quite so positive 
if his district were speaking to him instead of one 
who is no longer where he can vote either for or 
against him." The reformer therefore wrote to the 
Christian Endeavor headquarters in Boston, that the 
congressman from the Essex district "had not heard 
from home" on this question, and was about to vote 
the wrong way because his lazy Christian constitu- 
ents had not taken the trouble to express their 
views. The reformer also wrote to the pastors of 
Haverhill, Massachusetts, where he had formerly 



144 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

preached, and asked a Congregational preacher to 
notify all the Congregational preachers in the dis- 
trict, a Methodist, all the Methodists, a Baptist, all 
the Baptists. In half a week, one of the Boston 
papers said that the congressman from the Essex 
district had been "snowed under with letters against 
Sunday opening." And now for the sequel. The 
Committee, having captured one of the majority, 
which would give them a majority of one with the 
vote of the Essex member, sent into the House of 
Representatives to urge him to come at once to the 
Committee and enable them to report in favor of 
Sunday opening. But the letters from his district 
had created an armed neutrality. He would not 
vote against the expressed wishes of so many of his 
constituents, and the bill failed because it could not 
be reported without his affirmative vote. And so 
one Congressional district learned what many others 
still need to learn — the meaning of President 
Lincoln's great words, which to most people are still 
only a pretty saying, "Government of the people, by 
the people, and for the people." The royal family 
of America is King Everybody and His Wife, and 
the royal motto is, "Everybody's Business is No- 
body's Business." Let us change that by an awaken- 
ing sense of individual power in which everybody's 
business shall become everybody's business- 

I AM ONLY ONE, BUT I AM ONE; 

I CANNOT DO EVERYTHING, BUT I CAN DO SOME- 
THING; 

AND WHAT I CAN DO I OUGHT TO DO. 
AND, BY THE GRACE OF GOD, I WILL DO." 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 145 

MULTIPLY YOUR POWER BY UNITING WITH 
THE CHURCH. 

We have shown that "one shall chase a thousand" 
is not hyperbole but history, and yet we come back 
again to the divine multiplication, "two shall put ten 
thousand to flight," which puts on every individual 
the divine obligation to multiply himself by joining 
the Church. 

Until the Church is organized to handle all social 
problems, every citizen should also belong to at least 
one organization for social betterment. 

But no membership in any such outside associa- 
tion can displace the fundamental social duty of 
church membership that lies on every man who de- 
sires to make Christ King by making His laws the 
laws of this world. Whatever may be the defects of 
the Church, it is the mightiest force for good on 
earth, and every man and woman should help to in- 
crease its power. Whatever may be done by the 
individual, or by the scouting parties of reformers, 
the final victory can be won by no other force on 
earth save the main army of the Church of God, led 
on by consecrated prophets who are "seers" of God 
and so without fears of man. 

Governor Charles E. Hughes, of New York, in 
a tribute to Dr. Theodore L. Cuyler, said : "The 
sincere preacher we cannot afford to lose. We 
could better afford to lose governors or legislators, 



146 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

but there must be in the preacher a passion for 
righteousness!' 

WHAT THE WORLD EXPECTS OF THE CHURCH. 

In a profound editorial, in December, 1909, the 
Chicago Interior said: 

"The Church's tasks multiply all the 
while and grow harder. very recently no- 
body would have dreamed of looking to the 
Church for relief from oppressions of wicked 
public officials and thieving political rings. 
Its sphere was supposed to be on the opposite 
side of life from politics. but under push of 
moral indignations which precedent could 
not confine, the church here and there, once 
and again, has been driven to try its mettle 
fighting greed and vice. and in such con- 



*Dr. H. K. Carroll's annual census of American 
churches for 1909 (New York Christian Advocate Jan. 27, 
1910), shows the total membership of the churches to be 
34,677,000, a gain of 791,713 over previous year. There 
were 168,378 preachers, a gain of 4,023, and 215,160 
churches, a gain of 4,726. The report is encouraging as 
compared to a few years ago, when it took ninety and 
nine church members a whole year to bring one lost sheep 
into the fold. In 1909, it took only about half as many. 
In Protestant churches the women are almost twice as 
numerous as the men — 61 to 39. The number of sects has 
increased to 174, of which fully three-fourths are American 
inventions. Every attempt to make two denominations one 
increases two to three. Much of this sectarianism is a sin 
against God and a hindrance to social progress. The 
denominational groups with the largest membership roll 
are: Catholics, 12,372,069; Methodists, 6,477,224; Baptists, 
5,570,590; Lutherans, 2,173,047; Presbyterians, 1,848,046. 
Then come in order Episcopalians, Reformed, Mormons, 
United Brethren, Jews, Dunkards Friends, Adventists. 



NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 147 

flicts the church has discovered to itself and 
to the world a new possibility. the men who 
love graft and vice have learned a new fear. 
The men who hate them have got a new hope. 
Both the fear and the hope point to the 
Church. The reward of what little the 
Church has already done for civic and social 

REFORM IS THIS IT IS EXPECTED TO DO MORE. It 

IS A TERRIFIC THING FOR THE Church TO BE EX- 
PECTED. Its duty is serious enough when it 
has to thrust itself on a world that doesn't 
want it. But when the world is wanting it 
and waiting for it, then the responsibility 

OUGHT TO MAKE THE CHURCH QUAKE. If IT FAILS 
THEN, IT SQUANDERS OPPORTUNITY, AND TRADES AN 
OFFERED RESPECT FOR AN EARNED CONTEMPT. It NOT 

only disappoints god, but betrays humanity." 
"Men of the world have learned to wait 

until the Church leads because: 
"The Church has in it something which 

lasts ; 

"The Church when true to itself is really 
for the whole people j 

"The Church can present a solid front ; 

"The Church has Jesus Christ. The world 
knows Jesus was brave. It wants that cour- 
age NOW, AND HOPES TO FIND IT IN CHRIST'S FOL- 
LOWERS." 

Let us confront the problems of the hour in that 
spirit of triumphant hope which Browning de- 
clared in prose and poetry, and illustrated in his 



148 NATIONAL PERILS AND HOPES 

life. He wrote : "I hold not with the pessimist 
that all things are ill, nor with the optimist that 
all things are well. All things are not ill, and all 
things are not well, but all things shall be well, be- 
cause this is God's world." That explains the 
meaning of his lines : 

"God's in his heaven 
All's right with the world." 

And both of these help us to understand the words 
of his swan song, in which his own and every 
Christian's right attitude of hopeful courage is pic- 
tured : 

"One who never turned his back, but marched 
breast forward; 
Never doubted clouds would break; 
Never feared, though right were worsted, wrong 
would triumph; 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
sleep to wake." 



INDEX 



Abstinence, campaign for, 
needed, 9 

Alcohol, experimentation on, 
115 

Alcoholism, municipal pos- 
ters on, 115 

Alverstone, Lord, quoted, 11 

Anarchy, lynching the worst 
form of, 24 

Anti-Saloon League, 54 

Arkansas, divorces in, 18 
Louisiana lottery in, 89 

Arrests, increased by license, 
13 

Australia, industrial reforms 
in, 26 
gambling in, 97 

Baptists and divorce, 21 
temperance committee of 
the, 56 
Beer, introduction into 
U. S., 66 
consumption of, 3 
leads to drunkenness, 66 
Belgium, crimes in, 15 
Boards of trade, should op- 
pose saloons, 7 
Bribery of voters, 99 

Canada, crime in, 15 

reform work in, 62-64 
Capital and labor, 26-27 
Causes of moral evils, 65 
Chambers of commerce and 

saloons, 7 
Children, at moving picture 

shows, 38 
China, opium in, 102 
Christ, kingship of, 22 
Church and law enforce- 
ment, 33 
and moral evils, 10, 33, 
145-147 



battling with pugilism, 46 
enlistment of, in moral re- 
forms, 60 
membership, relation of to 
liquor consumption, 10 
membership, social duty 

of, 145 
slighting reforms, 58-60 
temperance committee of, 
10, 57 

Churches, Canadian, reform 
work in, 62-64 
Federation of, 51, 61, 62 
Cigarettes, crowded on 

China, 81 
Cincinnati, bossism in, 29 
Cities, problems of, 27-30 

corruption of, 68 
Civil service reform, 98 
Civil War, a cause of moral 

evils, 66 
Cleveland, corrupt literature 
in, 134-136 
moving picture shows in, 
37-38 
Colorado, divorce in, 18 
Commercialism, a cause of 

immorality, 68, 72 
Congress, reform legislation 

in, 42-44, 54-55 
Consumption of liquors, 2-5 
Cooperation, plan of, 116 
Corporations, rise and in- 
fluence, 69, 73 
Court reform, 49 
Crime, increasing, 14 
decrease of, under prohi- 
bition, 6 
proportion of, due to 

drink, 11-13 
shown in moving pictures, 
38 

Dakotas, lottery in the, 90 



150 



INDEX 



Desertion, not a ground for 

divorce, 20 
Disease, reduction in, 81 
District of Columbia, law on 

divorce, 18 
Divorce, desertion not a 
ground for, 20 
increasing, 16-18 
remedies for lax, 22 
union committee on, 17 
U. S. government report 
on, 18 
Doctors, duty toward re- 
forms, V. 
Duelling, nearly extinct, 82 

Education, moral, VI 

scientific temperance, 99- 
100 
England, crime in, 15 
Evils in which United States 
has worst record, 14-16 
four chief, 19 
thirteen increasing, 19 

Federation of churches, 51, 

61, 62 
Football, fatalities of, 48 
France, crime in, 15 
Sunday law of, 31 

Gambling, race, 44, 91-98 

George, Henry, theory as to 
cause of drink, 4 

Germany, crime in, 15 
experimentation in, on al- 
cohol, 115 

Good Templars, 54 

Government ownership, 70 

"Graft," 50 

Hale, Dr. Edward Everett, 

quoted, 65 
Honesty, should be taught 

in schools, VI, 74 
Hope, grounds of, 78 

Immigration, a cause of 
moral evils, 68 
restriction of, 69 



Indiana, divorces in, 18 
Individual activity, 128 
Insurance, temperance, 109 
International Reform Bu- 
reau, 54 

Japan, divorces in, 17 

anti-opium action of, 104, 
116 

Kansas, divorces in, 18 

Labor riots, 25-27 

methods in Great Britain 

and Australia, 26 
efficiency of, and drink, 

66-67 
leaders of, in moral re- 
forms, 114 

Law breaking, 51-53 

Lawyers, duty toward re- 
forms, VI 

Liquor dealers, fallacious 
arguments of, 5 
aroused activities of, 107 

Liquors, consumption of, 2- 
5 

Literature, corrupt, 35-37, 
130-136, 141 

Lobbying by letters, 142 

Lodges as saloon substi- 
tutes, 112 

Lotteries, successful war 
against, 87 

Louisiana lottery, 87 

Luxury and vice, 4, 69 
good use of, 75 

Lynching, 24-25 

Maine, divorces in, 18 

Marriage, sacredness of, 16, 
22 

Men's leagues, opportunities 
of, 57 

Methodists and divorce, 21 

Militarism, 66, 101 

Ministers, relation to re- 
forms, V 

Missions, relation to re- 
forms, 57, 59 



INDEX 



151 



Montana, divorces in, 18 
M oral reforms, labor 
leaders and, 114 
street cleaning, 136 
Mormonism, 16, 57, 85-87 
Moving picture shows, 37-39 
Municipal corruption, 27-30 
Murders, increasing, 2, 14-15 

Newspapers, Sunday, 32 

"yellow," 39-40 . 
New York, law on divorce, 

18 
"No license," reduces crime, 

6, 12-13 
North Dakota, divorces in, 

18 

Opium, world wide war on, 
102-106 

Piracy, disappearing, 81 
Pittsburg, corrupt literature 

in, 134 
Plague, nearly extinct, 80 
Politics, how degraded, 68, 

72 

Pollard, Judge W. J., 

quoted, 12 
Polygamy, fight against, 85 
Poverty, not chief cause of 

drink, 4, 65 
Presbyterians and divorce, 

20-21 
temperance committee of 

the, 56 
Prize fights, 41-50 
Prohibition and crime re- 
duction, 13 
not a panacea, 18 
extent of, in U. S., 106 
Pugilism, 41-50 
Purchasing of votes, 99 
Purity, should be taught in 

schools, VI, 22 
organizations to promote, 

35 



Race gambling, legislation 
against, 44, 91-98 

Railways, influence of, in 
politics, 70 

Roosevelt, President Theo- 
dore, and law enforce- 
ment, 30-49 

Sabbath desecration, 31-33 

Shows, corrupt, 37, 136 

Slavery, abolition of, 83 

Sociology, relations of, to 
theology, 76 

South Dakota, divorces in, 
18 

"Spoils System," diminish- 
ing, 98 

Sports, brutal, 41 

St. Paul, pugilism in, 46-48 

Strikes, 27 

Sunday trains, 31-32, 51 
newspapers, 32, 51 
schools, ethical teaching 

in, VI 
schools and street envi- 
ronment 35-39 

Taft, President W. H., 
quoted, 49 
call of opium conference 
by, 105 

Teachers, duty toward re- 
forms, VI 
Temperance, forces too scat- 
tered, 119 

joint commission on, 126 

meetings, public officials 
at, 112 

organizations, centennial 
of, 120 

education, scientific, 99- 
100 

Theatricals, corrupting, 37 
Theology, relation of, to 

sociology, 76 
Trusts, relation of, to 

prices, VII 



152 



INDEX 



United States and other na- 
tions compared, 108-116 
crime in, 15 

Votes, purchase of, 99 

Wales, crime in, 15 

War, promotes moral evils, 
66 
as absurd as duelling, 83 
should be abolished, 101 

Washington, divorces in, 18 

Whiskey, consumption of, 3 



White, Hon. A. D., quoted, 
15-28 

"White Slavery," 34 

Willard, Dr. Frances E., 
quoted, 22 

Woman's Christian Temper- 
ance Union, 22, 54, 86, 
100 

Women's clubs, 86 
Worcester, "no license," ex- 
periment of, 18 



JUL 5 1918 



A* 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



